


to the overwhelming light surrounding us

by Dialux



Category: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Diplomacy, F/M, Fantastic Racism, Father-Daughter Relationship, Historical References, Magic, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Mystery, Origin Story, Post-Canon, Vortigern's A+ Parenting, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-14 03:09:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 32,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16904979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: Her name is--





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jedibuttercup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedibuttercup/gifts).



> 1\. I.... tried?  
> 2\. You don't need to know anything about the movie apart from that Catia is Vortigern's daughter whom he kills to gain power from these sirens; Arthur kills Vortigern, and Catia is fridged.  
> 3\. Also, like, the genre of this fic still eludes me! IT'S WORLDBUILDING AND ORIGIN STORY AND FANTASTICAL AND AND AND AND AND-  
> 4\. @jedibuttercup, your YT letter was Brill. I used (almost) every plot point I could shoehorn in that you mentioned, mostly because I was in awe of how incisive it was!  
> 5\. A general warning for genocide, misogyny, abuse, ummmmm and also like?? Normalization?? Of terrible morals??  
> 6\. Above sounds scary but it's NOT!!! IT'S VERY MUCH A FIC WITH A HAPPY ENDING I PROMISE  
> 7\. Enjoy!

_we will try to walk lightly;_  
_we will try to hold it all without breaking-_  
_but we take too much._  
_we have already_  
_taken too much._

...

Catia drowns.

The pain lasts only for a short time. Her vision fades first; then the breathless ache in her lungs, the flashes of panic in her fingers; then the brackish deadness in her mouth. Until all that’s left of her is sound, whatever little Catia can hear. Even that comes slower after a time- quieter, distorted as if from a great distance.

For an eternity, Catia drowns alive.

...

She dreams: her mother’s hands, cool and dry on Catia’s cheeks. The swooping joy of watching a hawk spear downwards. Her father, tall and dark and shining on his throne. Damp grass stains on her skirts. The ache of her head after a sleepless night in the library. Songs in a grove, high and piercing. Her nurse’s snores.

A white flower, gold spilling from the middle.

...

A white flower.

...

White.

...

It is not sight, not entirely- and yet she  _sees,_  in her mind: flickering light, slowly growing in size. It’s red. Red, gold, shining and brilliant like nothing else that she’s seen before. Catia has no way to measure time, and still impatience gnaws away inside her as she awaits its arrival.

(Not fear.

Fear is her cousin’s inheritance, fear and loss and despair. Catia’s inheritance is sharper things than that.)

The flame grows and grows, until it is twice her height and so close Catia thinks her arm-hair has been singed away.

 _Daughter,_ it says.

Catia feels something swell up inside of her. Rage, perhaps. Or grief. Or- pain. Unending and bitter as all the oceans of the world. She thinks of snarling, or weeping, or perhaps just averting her face.

 _Father?_ she asks, trembling.

The fire blazes, bright and glittering scarlet.

 _Catia,_ it says.  _Daughter of Vortigern, called Gorlois at birth. I am not him._

_Then-_

_But he was_ mine,  _as are so few these days._ The fire dims a little.  _He bound himself to me all those years ago, in this very cave. Through him- so were you._

Her fingers feel cold, despite the proximity to the fire.  _Were,_ says Catia, quietly.

_A knife to your chest, a bargain offered. He killed you. He killed the flame in you._

_How?_ Catia asks. It hasn’t- she hasn’t- it’s like someone’s drowning her all over again- it  _hurts,_ something’s gone cold in her chest-  _Why?_

 _Ah, child,_ murmurs the fire.  _Have you ever known what it is like, to have something impossible in the palm of your hand? Have you ever known what it is like, to want something so dearly you would die if you did not have it? Have you ever known what it is like, to be the most powerful man in a room of people who’d once mocked you? You are his daughter. You are mine. And you should have understood that. Would have, if not for your other inheritance._

Other inheritance. Catia’s lungs cannot inhale or exhale, but still it feels like someone’s carved a hole in them.

 _When two people sworn to an element lie together, the child can be more powerful than either._ Sparks trail from its fingers, all the way down to the bed of her mind, where they fade.  _Or the child can be neither. Wind gusts flames high, even as it snuffs them out. But when your father killed your fire... it opened doors._

 _My mother?_ she asks, in the place of all the grief lining her voice.

 _Your mother,_ it agrees, aflame and terrible and grand.  _You are Catia, daughter of Vortigern. That, none can steal from you. But you are also Catia, daughter of Elsa. That means something._

_Why are you telling me this?_

_Injustice must be redressed. Fire’s bindings have been broken. Your father is dead. And this- this is a goodbye, child._

_I don’t understand._

The flame rises, higher, higher, spiraling upwards to the upper reaches of Catia’s mind. It pales, then deepens, until it’s a brilliant white, bright as the petals of a flower that Catia has only ever seen before in her mind’s eye.

 _You will,_ says the flame.  _Oh, child, you_ will.

...

Catia’s eyes open.

She gasps, then sorely regrets that. Her lungs burn as she flounders. The water is shallow- she can feel the rocks scraping at her fingers- but her head’s still underwater, and she’s dizzy enough that she doesn’t even know which way’s up and down.

By more accident than anything, Catia manages to scramble backwards and sit up, the water lapping up to her chest, the stone rough against her back.

Her teeth are chattering, she’s missing her shoes, and she doesn’t even have a cloak. She’s freezing; Catia can scarcely bring herself to move, much less breathe. When she looks down, her white dress is crusted red, plastered to her body.

Panic surges through her mind.

The burn of a knife through her side, the ache of water in her lungs, the chill of this terrible water- Catia remembers it all. The fear gives her limbs enough energy to make it the last few yards to dry land. But it fades then, and she’s left shivering, breathless, on damp stone.

_In the old stories, the heroes did what they had to._

Catia grits her teeth and forces herself to sit up. She runs a hand down her side, slowly, waiting for the pain- but nothing comes. There’s a slash cutting through the silk, but the skin under is whole. It leaves her uneasy. This whole-  _thing-_ leaves her uneasy. There’s a weight to the air that leaves Catia’s hair prickling, even through the cold.

 _Think, damn you!_ she commands herself.  _We need-_

But her mind stutters to a halt. Catia doesn’t know what she needs. Catia doesn’t even know where she is. It’s dark and cold, and she’d almost died in these waters, and Catia doesn’t know what that fire-being had meant, and it’s confusing and aching and everything just plain hurts.

When she was little, her nurse had cradled her fingers after Catia nearly sprained some fingers trying a fancy stitch.  _Start simple,_ she’d said, then and again, over and over for the long years that she’d watched over Catia. Catia wants that warm, dry room. The warmth of someone’s hands around her own, the unequivocal knowledge that the pain will stop. That someone will stop it.

All she has is herself, now.

Slowly, she breathes. Counts things to be glad for: she’s not injured, she’s alive, her clothing hasn’t rotted off her body. Then starts listing things that she needs: food, heat- preferably fire- and dry clothes. A way out of this cave. Knowledge- how long has it been since she died? If her father is dead, then what happens to her? What’s happened to the kingdom?

Her fingers flex. She’s so tired.

 _I am a Pendragon._ Catia levers herself upright.  _I am better than this._

The world feels like it’s spinning. Catia bears through it with gritted teeth. As it stabilizes, the first color that appears is a deep, deep white. She doesn’t look away: just focuses on the flower, floating and white and brighter than anything else in the entire cave.

When she finally lets herself see further, there’s a line of flowers, each shining and bright and  _white._

A line of flowers, leading further into the caves.

 _Or out,_ thinks Catia, and shakes her head.

Breathes, in-out, in-out. Digs her fingers into her palms. Takes one step forwards, then another, then another. Slips, falls, bruises her knees- then grits her teeth. Rises. Walks. Soon enough it’s so dark that she can’t see anything but the flowers, glowing from within. Even standing the water reaches up to her chest. If there’s something in the water...

Catia doesn’t think on it. Just  _moves._

Slowly, so slowly that she doesn’t even realize it, the absolute darkness lightens. Catia can see her hands, and that’s when she realizes that the water level has fallen, too; then, suddenly, the darkness is shattered, and there are stars above her.

The flowers guide her to the shore, where Catia clambers onto grass and collapses.

She closes her eyes. Then opens them, and stares up into the brilliance of the night sky. There are tears, somewhere, underneath all the exhaustion and grief, at this beauty. When her body slipped into the cave’s waters, she hadn’t ever expected to see the stars again.

 _This, too, I have to be grateful for._ The thought gives her strength enough to rise.  _The stars, this chance to see them again. The grass, this chance to feel it once more. The wind- oh, how I’d missed that-_

She turns to the river. And though she feels foolish, Catia bows.

“Thank you,” she says. 

The first words she’s said since being brought to life, that aren’t just hisses or short exhalations. But the flowers guided her out of the caves, and they came from some higher power. Perhaps that fire-being, in her dream.

And gratitude always has a power.

Then Catia sees the blue flowers at her feet, and realizes where she is.

She knows this place- she’s come here before, often enough, for picnics. It’s close to the castle. Dangerously close, if she’s trying to avoid the new king. But her father hadn’t liked Catia to go anywhere too far; this private little meadow had been the furthest she’d ever been able to convince him of. She’d always loved these blue-flowered vines, creeping from the river all the way down the sheer cliffs just a little ways off, dangling in thick clumps.

It hurts to talk. But it’s a good ache. Easier dealt with than the tiredness dragging at her bones, so deep she doesn’t think she’ll be able to sleep even if she got the courage enough to do so. Simpler, in its own way.

“I can go up to the castle,” says Catia, hoarsely, hands trailing in the shallow water around the white flower’s roots. “There’s- I know the way. Or I can go- away. I don’t know how the new king is. But I’m so tired. I don’t... I don’t  _know_  what to do.” She doesn’t know why she’s talking, but she hasn’t ever been quiet in her life and she won’t learn now. “I need help.”

The water seems to glow, for a bare second, lighting up the entire meadow like it’s high noon. Catia doesn’t even know if she actually saw it or if a part of her mind has just gone insane. The latter seems more realistic than the idea that a river would just- light up.

Then a wind plucks at her hair, rustles the flowers until the stem’s bent in the direction of the cliffs.

Perhaps it’s nothing at all.

But maybe it isn’t nothing, either.

And Catia needs help.

“Thank you,” she rasps out, again, before she rises. 

And yet- when she tries to leave the river, it gets harder to breathe. Catia staggers, almost falling over, and when she looks back the flowers are curving like a bow ready to be sprung.

The flowers are curving, straight to her body.

“I-” Catia reaches out, back, and a surge of strength floods through her bones when her fingers dip into the water. “What’s happening?” Catia asks, horrified. “What’s- this isn’t what-  _what’s happening to me?”_

The world goes white with panic.

By the time that, too, recedes, Catia feels herself choke on a sob. Even mindless with terror, her hand hasn’t left the river. It’s funny. It’s funny in the same way that Catia trusting her father is funny; terrible and ironic and still funny that she’d ever been so blind. That she’d ever had that kind of innocence.

“Why?” she asks. “Why bring me back? Why help me? Why give me something so- so- oh, Dagda above.” Fear fizzles through her chest when she calls on the god. Perversely, it makes her angrier. “I didn’t ask for this! I never asked for any of this!”

_But you have it anyways. A boon or a curse? It is up to you to give it a name._

_And the Pendragons have always had a gift for twisting curses into boons._

“Fine,” whispers Catia. “Fine. Let’s play your game.”

The night air is so cold over her hair, down her spine. The stars are a wobbly, distant brightness above her. She is aching and tired, and she yet has so far to go. But she’s a princess. Catia is a Pendragon. There is more to her than the griefs she bears, or the prices she’s paid.

 _I will play,_ she thinks.  _And I will beat you, all of you, at this game._

_Watch me._

_Watch me, if you dare._

She breathes. Keeps her mind blank. Then she rises to her feet, and puts one foot in front of the other, so close to the river that her feet are still damp. Catia walks, stumbling, slow, but onwards. 

...

If anyone had bother to ask, Catia’s favorite person in the entirety of court was a red-bearded scop named Deor, who’d had a voice so deep it could slip between her bones and make them tremble. He’d disappeared years ago, though; there one morning and gone the next.

She’d taught herself to sing each of her favorite songs, then, over the weeks following his departure.

It shouldn’t matter. But it does: Catia walks, slips, slides, and for every painful moment along the way, she sings.

...

 _“Eastern wind, blow clear, blow clean,”_ she cries.  _“Bring me healing from the east-”_

...

Ragged cliffs give way to thick forests.

The river twists through a meadow of thick bushes, laden with berries. Catia spends one afternoon gorging herself on them, enough that her stomach feels swollen and sick.

That evening, she’s tired of sweetness. There’s fish at her feet, in the clear water, and Catia just-  _wants._

The wriggling flesh of the fish is slippery, but frozen in place.

It slides out of her hand when she lifts it out of the water. Catia’s palms clench instinctively, and for just a breath, nothing more, nothing less, the pulsing beat of the river around her legs goes still, as calm as a pond.

Later, even as the river continues to flow, the fish is stuck by her feet, held by nothing but the power of her eyes and bone-deep desire.

Catia cooks it slowly that night. Savors the flesh between her teeth. It’s a sort of triumph, even if she wouldn’t have called it that at the time.

...

There isn’t much anywhere about oathed elementals.

Catia knows this. All of what she knows could be summed up in only a few scarce terms: they’d been the finest, the foremost among all the mages. They’d once been many, from Tintagel in the south all the way to the fire-sprites in Scotland. The greatest warriors in the oldest songs had always been oathed elementals.

And Mordred had been a fire elemental.

Elemental oathed warriors were the first enclaves who’d stood against Mordred. They’d been the first to die.

Years and years ago, a man had been executed in the throne room. He’d been a mage, hidden inside of Camelot’s walls- well-hidden, and careful, but also desperately in love with one of Catia’s ladies. He’d charmed her with a bouquet of magical flowers that she’d brought to the castle, where Catia’s father had gone on a rampage. Before he died, he’d screamed something about Mordred’s legacy.

And what had the fire-being said of Catia’s father?  _As are so few these days._

The pieces are there in Catia’s mind. They are there. They do not fit, not yet, not perfectly, but they are  _there._

She does not think she’ll like the story it depicts.

...

The elementals rose. The elementals died. Mordred rose. Mordred died. Uther rose. Uther died.

Vortigern rose.

Vortigern died.

Catia died.

That should have been the end of it. Catia’s death should have been nothing but an- aberration. A snagged thread in the tapestry of Brittany, like her mother’s death before her, like her aunt’s death before that. But Catia hasn’t stayed dead.

_Mother._

She doesn’t know why she thinks of her, but every step that Catia takes beside the river, the more she remembers a woman nearly two decades dead.  _Elsa,_ sing the birds above her, rustles the river cold at her ankles.  _Elsa, Elsa._ Memories she cannot possibly remember are what she sees when she closes her eyes.

(Water splashes her face from a stray branch, and suddenly all Catia can see is a flood, twice her height and bearing down on her. Her hands are up, and there is a village behind her, and she grinds her teeth so hard it aches behind her eyes.

The water splits around her. Cleaves in half, like it’s just faced a solid rock wall.)

Catia can’t help but feel-  _that’s_ the reason why she isn’t dead.

...

Humans aren’t given powers until they swear. They need years of training. Then they go on a quest, at the end of it all, before returning as proper elementals. Catia knows this, and still water obeys her like it’s an extension of her arms. She hasn’t sworn any vows. She reminds herself, every time she flicks her fingers and the water rises to match. Catia hasn’t sworn any vows.

...

(But there are stories, aren’t there?

Of the vows of mothers.)

...

Once upon a time. 

Once upon a time, Camelot had been... not less than it was now, but different. Mediators between mages and magicless people. Kings of understanding, and grandeur, and the power of a soft word with a magic-honed sword behind it. Magicless of themselves, but their wives hadn’t been. They’d foster their sons to other kingdoms, their daughters to mage enclaves. It was a system that worked, and worked well, until Catia’s grandfather fell in love with the wrong woman.

Mages rioted across Brittany. 

Catia had thought it made a ruthless sort of sense. And her grandfather Gormant had been nothing if not ruthless.

He’d taken the throne at sixteen; he’d held it for sixty long, wartorn years. The Romans had burned the druid groves and all but broken the back of the mage resistance. They’d showed no signs of stopping for anyone, and a sixteen year old boy wedding a hand-picked mage from the enclaves? Camelot would have as like as not been burned by the Roman legions. Brittany would have been run over.

He’d fostered Vortigern- who, then, before his training with the mages, had been called Gorlois- out to Mercia, Camelot’s closest neighbor to the south; he’d fostered Uther to Essex. Camelot was a mountainous country. It needed imports during the winters to survive, and Gormant had done a marvelous job of negotiating the treaties for it.

Up until the Mercians double-crossed him.

He’d raised import duties, had a falling out with the Mercian ambassador, recalled Vortigern, and kept Vortigern in Camelot for all of a month before fostering him out to the first mage enclave he could find.

Bad blood between the mages and the Pendragons for fifty years, the mages’ long memories, and a headstrong teenager to fan the flames. Catia’s father had been many things, but a diplomat had never been one of them. She can imagine how badly those bonds must have deteriorated.

This is what she dreams of, when she allows herself to sleep, the river’s roar deafening in her ears.

Letters. Histories. Secrets, scurried away before anyone realizes what she’s heard. Whispers tucked beneath a placid smile.

 _Where was my father fostered to?_ Catia startles awake, eyes streaming, chest heaving.  _The first enclave his father found._

The firesworn.

...

There is a storm coming.

To survive, Catia must be as ruthless as her grandfather. As noble as her uncle. As vicious as her father.

As silent as her mother.

...

It’s a sunny morning when Catia all but walks into a group of hunters.

She freezes. They freeze, too, staring. All Catia can think of is the matted mess of her hair, the snarled, torn shreds of her gown. Mud and slime streaks the white dress until it’s some colorless shade of brown. It’s sunny and the birds are singing, and these are men who-

These are men who-

People say that mages are  _different._ Catia hadn’t known the truth of it until now, when the world’s bright and shining and still it all feels dull under the force of the men’s power. She notes all of this distantly, in the part of her still capable of such thought.

With the rest of her, Catia runs.

...

They chase.

Of course they chase after her.

Catia’s probably faster than them. The water’s helping her, she realizes; it’s lending her speed, fading from the flat stones, making others more slippery for them. But it’s nowhere near enough.

Catia hasn’t eaten properly in days. She’s been dead for weeks before that. She’s shoeless, and tired, and if not for the water she would have been caught almost immediately.

When she finally pauses, she’s standing in the middle of the river.

Her lungs are burning. There’s no way she’ll be able to move further. It all just plain hurts too much.

“You’re a mage,” one of them says. “Listen. We’re going to take you to our home. It’ll be safe for you there.”

 _A Pendragon, among mages?_ Catia wants to laugh. If her sides hadn’t been aching so much, she might well have.

“I’m fine as I am,” she says. “All I want is for you to-”

 _Tricksters!_ Catia snarls, wordlessly, in her mind, the rest of the man’s sentence lost to her abrupt rage and panic.

The other man had shielded himself from her sight. Catia doesn’t know how; he’d just appeared before her, close enough to grab her by the waist. But she doesn’t freeze this time. No. Catia is standing in the middle of the river, which is the source of her power, and she moves just fast enough to catch the man off guard.

Drops to one knee. Lashes out with a fist and then a kick, and manages to push the man off balance, further into the river. Completes the turn of the kick and clenches her fist, and the river roars like thunder in response.

It rises.

It swallows the man whole.

Catia doesn’t hesitate, then. Just turns and steps into the river, trusts bone-deep that she won’t drown. She flows along with it, head just above the water, and the world feels so sharp, so dangerous, that it might as well just have slit her lengthwise, lifted her soul and heart and life outside of the beating body.

For a long moment, she thinks she might have escaped.

But even as the hope rises, the water around her tightens and Catia inhales sharply, twisting to see what’s happening-

-something snaps around her knees-

-rope that she hadn’t seen before surges out of the riverbed.

It drags her out of the water. She’s dangling above the river, like a flopping fish. It’s not that far- a scarce few meters- but it’s still the farthest she’s been from the river in the past weeks.

And it  _burns._

Catia gasps. Twists.

There’s a stabbing pain in her side.

There’s-  _darkness, flame, fear, want want want- this-is-mine-and-I-don’t-want-to-die-like-this- I-am-so-afraid-make-the-pain-stop- I-_ want-

She cannot breathe. She-

She-

The world goes dark.

...

When she wakes, it’s far less painful than she’d expected.

Her eyes focus on a yellow ceiling above her, sagging low enough that she could probably reach out and touch it. Catia breathes in, raggedly, and it feels like she inhales pain with the air. The world goes painfully bright, painfully loud. She exhales and closes her eyes; all she lets herself feel is the rough weave of the cloth under her fingers for long, terrible moments.

Then she opens her eyes again, and this time she bears through the first wave of pain with gritted teeth.

When it recedes, Catia risks movement.

It leaves her a little dizzy. Like she’d fallen asleep in the sun, and was suddenly woken by her guards. But not nauseous, though her stomach feels like it might chew itself if she doesn’t get food soon. Not exhausted either; now that it’s gone, Catia realizes how weary she’d been ever since coming back- she’d slept only when necessary, and even then, only for long enough to give her the strength to continue on.

She doesn’t feel  _good,_ not in the way that the river had made her feel good, but she does feel more normal.

Slowly, Catia guides herself upright. Then, silently, she gets up.

She doesn’t limp- her legs aren’t hurt; no part of her seems hurt- and doesn’t walk either. It’s a stagger, each step lurched forwards on muscles that feel like they’ve forgotten how to move.

The vibrations from her graceless movement aren’t pleasant on the undersides of her feet. But it doesn’t hurt as much as it could, which is what Catia keeps running through her mind as she approaches the entrance:  _this, too, you have to be grateful for._

Before she reaches the entrance, though, a woman bustles in.

Catia yelps, recoiling in surprise. She almost unbalances as she does so- tips backwards, arms flailing in uncoordinated shock- but manages to catch herself on one of the support posts through sheer chance. When she looks up, the woman is staring as well.

“You’re awake,” she says, voice accented strangely. “Why are you out of- get back in the bed! You’re not supposed to be awake! You’re not supposed to be  _moving,_ get-”

“Who are you?” Catia asks.

It doesn’t come out quite as frightened as she’d thought it would. It’s rather- belligerent, her father might have said, if he’d heard her tone. Belligerent. Demanding. Some version of royal, if petulancy was encouraged.

Her head feels like it’s been swaddled in white cotton.  _Damn it,_ Catia thinks, before she draws herself up. If nothing else, she has her father’s height.

“Marda,” says the woman. She has bright green eyes, and is dressed in the kind of wool that even peasants might find rough. 

“I didn’t mean your name,” Catia snaps. “Gods knows what I’d do with that.” She lets her lips twist into a sneer, her eyes to rake over Marda’s clothes.

It’s her father’s favorite lesson: if you can’t beat them, annoy them until you can. If only her voice weren’t so raspy, and heavens know how her hair looks in its current state, but she also knows how to work with what she has. Regality is something beyond clothes and looks.

Marda’s reacts- precisely as Catia wants. Her chin goes up, anger flaring in her eyes. “I’m the woman who’s been tending you for the past two days. Lord knows how bad you looked coming in- and I’ll not have you undoing my work because you’re-”

She steps forwards, sliding the clay pot she’s holding onto the table. Catia catches only a glimpse of the paste inside of it- the pungent smell, the green color that’s far darker than Marda’s eyes.

Catia lets her shuffle Catia backwards, towards the bed; when they reach it, Marda pushes at Catia’s collarbone until she lies down. She goes to the table and returns with the paste.

“This is going to make you sleepy,” says Marda. Her voice is gentler, like she actually cares about healing Catia. “I’m just going to put it on your head, right beneath your hair-” she does, smearing it over Catia’s forehead, and it feels cool. Relaxing. Soothing.

Catia lets her eyes close. Lets herself drift- she’s so  _tired,_ and hungry, and it’s been a very long time since someone was this gentle with her- but she doesn’t sleep. She’s aware when Marda stops putting the paste, and opens her eyes.

Marda’s wrist is just pulling away from her face.

The skin there looks soft. Blue-veined. And between the sharp lines of her bones, stamped black as a bruise, is a symbol.

Catia sleeps.

...

She dreams: she’s standing on a stony island, and there are waves ten times- twenty times- her height, crashing down. There’s no one else on the island. It’s painful and she is afraid; but she doesn’t falter.  _Just tonight,_ she thinks, over and over again, nails digging into the meat of her palm.  _Just tonight and it will be over._

But it isn’t the waves that hurt. No.

It’s a memory: she is alone, and there is a reason for that. She is alone, and she doesn’t want to be, and there is no choice to it. She is so-

Alone.

...

When she wakes, Catia doesn’t move.

She breathes.

Her limbs don’t hurt. Her mind feels- clearer. Not as good as before; but more stable.

Memory returns: the desperate race across the river. The pounding ache in her limbs. The distant jangles; the ambient noise of a large camp. Marda’s clothes. The smell of that ointment- a smell she’s only ever experienced in one other place. The silence around her now; the building which hadn’t been half as shoddily built as it should have been for-

“Druids,” Catia spits, rising and rolling off the bed. 

Her hands come up.

Before, she’d forgotten. She’d been Catia, princess, the girl cared-for and beloved. The girl who’d loved her father, desperately, up until he’d killed her.

But she has the power of the river now.

Even if there is no river around her- Catia has  _water._ She doesn’t need to see it to know where it is, and it is there, close. So close that the water surges forwards, wraps around her wrists in thick, freezing bracelets.

It’s only then that she turns. Looks. A man is there in the darkest part of the room- Catia snarls, inwardly- and flicks her fingers.

The water flies out of her hands. Presses against the man’s neck. Holds, because Catia has never wanted anything to happen more.

“You’re druids,” she says. “What are you doing in  _Camelot?”_

 _You’re not welcome here,_ she wants to say.

The man holds up his hands. They’re empty.

Slowly, Catia pulls the water away, so he can speak. They both know her power now, anyhow. Better he speak and tell her, than stay silent.

“The new king is welcoming us to his land,” says the man. “He might welcome you as well, elemental.”

The rest of the words are calm enough, but the way he shapes his mouth around  _elemental_ makes it sound like a curse.  _Ah,_ thinks Catia, wryly.  _So I’ve managed to damn myself with who I am._ It’s happened before; some of Catia’s tutors hadn’t understood why her father insisted she learn Gallic, learn sums, learn the intricacies of politics. She’d enjoyed looking stupid in front of them, and sending them packing in front of her father. She thinks she’ll enjoy irritating this man, too.

“And you believed him,” says Catia. 

“He is the born king.” The man’s voice doesn’t rise. “All mages are welcome, as stated by the decrees of Camelot. Druids, dreamseekers, skinchangers. Even-elementals.” 

“And what might he have against elementals?” Catia asks coldly.  _What might you have against elementals?_

“Who was Vortigern if not an elemental?”

_My father._

_He was my_ father.

“Believe me, I did not wish to be here.” Catia straightens, uses her height to look down on the man’s sharp features. “Your men chased me. I would have gone on my way without issue if they hadn’t.”

“They chased you because they thought you a watersprite,” says the man. “Imagine their surprise when they found you in their trap instead- human. Imagine their surprise when they realized that you were unconscious.” He advances, one step closer to Catia’s frozen form. “Imagine their surprise when they realized how desperately you required their- our- aid.”

“Why would I have need of your aid?” Catia asks scornfully. “For a bed? Rest? That would have-”

“You were water-poisoned,” the man bites out. He’s magnificent in his own scorn- Catia thinks he might even have rivaled her father in that. 

She doesn’t quite pause, though Catia does consider how next to phrase her attack. She can feel herself being pushed back, drowning; and she’s never dealt with defense well. She is an attacker. Always has been.

“If you mean drowning,” says Catia, “then I can assure you- I was in less danger of drowning than I was of being skewered by your men.”

“I don’t mean drowning,” says the man. He waves a hand, and Catia flinches, violently, as the lamps around the room light up. Water solidifies in her hands, sharp as a serrated knife. His face turns taut, furious, as he sees it. “There are many kinds of poison. Withholding things necessary for life is called starving. Putting too much in the body- that is drowning. Unbalancing the parts of us that are ours? That, is poison.”

Catia smiles thinly. “I was not water-poisoned.”

“The river gave you power,” he says. It says something- Catia can see that much- the twist of his shoulders, the stamp on Marda’s wrist, the shadows in this room. They all mean something. “Did you not think that it was killing you as well?”

 _The river saved my life. Brought me_ back  _to life. Why would it try to kill me?_

“No,” she says aloud. “Why would it-”

“Because the river does not know your limits!” the man snaps, abruptly shouting. “Because you are of the river, and still not, and it will not be content until you have lost one in the favor of the other! Because you are human and it is  _not,_ and the smallest child knows better than to be as foolish as you have been!”

“Foolish,” says Catia, quietly.

“Foolish! Where do monsters come from, do you think, you little fool? Elementals gone  _mad_ are our horror stories!”

Catia’s hands feel cold. The knife melts in her hands, drips sadly down to a puddle at her feet. But her spine is straight. Her eyes don’t waver.

“If I had another choice,” she says levelly, “I would have taken it. When put into a corner- when there are no good options- one must act. Do what one must.”

“What do you know of choices?” he snorts.

“I know enough.” Catia glares at him. “I am not sorry for surviving. And I don’t think that you have any lessons to teach me,  _Merlin.”_

Merlin.

Druids that answer to one man.  _His men,_  he’d said, an ease to the words that could only come with decades of practiced, unchallenged authority. The unthinking wave of his fingers to set the lamps around them alight- and now that she looks, Catia can see that it isn’t fire that lights them.

It’s magic.

Pure. Magic.

There’s only been one mage in all of history that has been able to craft magic itself to his will.

She looks at Merlin, straight in the eye, and bares her teeth.

There is a difference between reading about druids in her storybooks and meeting them in person. If they learn whose daughter she is... Catia doesn’t know if her father’s stories of them rending Camelot’s soldiers limb from limb are true or exaggeration, and she doesn’t want to find out, either.

“Abomination,” he hisses. “You and yours- oh, what I would give to see you dead. Mordred and Vortigern and all the rest. This power drives you mad. It is too much for any one man to wield. I have given-  _everything-_ to cull it, and you dare to ruin it all? You, who knows less than the barest child of three summers!”

Anger flashes through Catia’s bones, hot like a spark on tinder. “Too much power for one man to wield,” she drawls back, barely bothering to hide it. “And yet you command how many men? How many dreamseekers, skinchangers- how many will do as you bid?” Her hands lift, draw the water with it. “You are afraid of a river. But what can a river do, when humans change its course?”

“You do not know what I have done to get what I have,” Merlin tells her. “You cannot imagine-”

“I know your sins,” replies Catia, as coldly as she can manage.

She knows that black stamp, set between the bones of Marda’s forearm. Even blurred with exhaustion, fever, on death’s doorstep- Catia would know it. Everyone in the land would. Catia even knows what the history books call it- a sea-goat. But that’s such a simple name, so dry, so flat. It tells nothing of its  _meaning:_ death, ruination; merciless, ordered destruction.

So she knows that stamp. She knows that accent, too, thickening Marda’s voice. Catia is not- has never been- stupid, no matter the number of times it’s been a useful shield.

“How much did it take for you to strike a deal with them?” Catia asks, fingers shaking, the water around her trembling. She wonders at her own rage. But these- these are her  _people,_ and Catia will not let that be desecrated. Camelot is more than her kings. Camelot is hers, wholly, entirely, and Catia will not let any of that be taken. Not for all the desperation in the world. “How much did it take for them to accept you, Merlin? How much did it take for the others to forget Anglesey?”

Anglesey. The site of slaughter, the likes of which had inspired Mordred’s worst atrocities, decades and decades ago. It had been the druids’ last stand against the Romans. It had been their shattering.

Merlin, now, has gone pale. His skin is not wrinkled- he doesn’t look half as old as he should- but he looks older now than before, the skin thin and colorless and sagging around his eyes.

“Who told you-” he shakes his head. “Who are you? A girl from Londinium who knows nothing of magic.” His eyes narrow. “Who speaks like a noble. Who knows nothing of magic, but everything of mages. Tell me, girl, what were you to Vortigern?” 

Catia flinches. She can’t help it. That  _name-_

“That’s what I thought,” says Merlin, deep satisfaction suffusing his face. He slashes one hand down, and Catia feels something rise up out of the dirt under her feet, hanging in the air. “I will die,” he says, “before I let another elemental lead us to ruin.”

Catia realizes that something’s going to happen, suddenly; she doesn’t know what, and she doesn’t know how, but it will- she yanks the water towards her, desperately, as quick as she can, but it’s too little. Too late.

The dust hanging in the air turns to flame, and Catia knows nothing more.

...

She dreams: water, rippling around her. Body floating in endless, brilliant blue.

Not a storm. Not cold.

Warm as an embrace. It should feel confining, but- all Catia feels is comfort. It’s been so long since someone held her. Nurse had left for her own grandchildren, and never returned. Her father had never been the loving kind. After a time, she'd learned not to hold her ladies close. Not when they would leave so often, so quietly. Her throat aches at the thought, though Catia doesn't weep for it. Has anyone mourned me? she wants to ask. Does anyone remember me in Camelot? In my home?

"My love," says a woman behind her. 

Catia whirls around, arms coming up; but the water does not answer her call. She only bobs in it, and it only laps at her belly and her chest with such calm that the thorny fears in her throat dissolve. She looks up, and sees a woman with dark, dark hair; eyes the grey of a storm. She wears a white gown that would look Roman if not for the lack of all veils, and her arms- she has blue stones bracketing her arms, from wrist to elbow.

 _Mage,_ thinks Catia. She doesn’t know what to say, so she stares instead.

The woman smiles, and she looks sad.

“It has been so long," she says.

"Yes," agrees Catia numbly.

"Do you know me?"

"I think so," says Catia. She digs her fingers into the water. "Elsa, of- the water enclave." She swallows. Thinks about blue stones and smooth skin and a laugh like the toll of a bell. "Mother."

Her mother's smile softens. "Oh, Catia," she says. "My dear, dear daughter. How I have wished to hold you- how I have watched you from afar." She reaches out, and cups Catia’s cheek in one hand. Her hand is damp with the water around them, but not cold with it. "I used to dream of you, when you were in my womb- what you would do, what you would become. You have eclipsed them all.”

“All I’ve done is live,” says Catia slowly.

“Bel gifted you your life, yes, but after?” Her mother lets her hand fall. “You have lived three weeks of confusion and exhaustion. Greater people have crumbled for less. He did not make you immortal. Every time you fell, you rose again.” Her eyes are like liquid ink, so dark, so fathomless. Catia cannot see anything but softness in them, and that plucks something deep and tangled in her ribcage. “Do you think I would ever be less than proud of you?”

Catia folds her shaking hands together. “I- I don’t know anything of you. I don't remember you, and- and my father never told me anything either.” She juts her chin out. “I can forgive Father of a lot. But not that.”

“You can forgive him killing you, but not this?” Elsa smiles, broad as the mouth of a mountain. “Ah, child, you are indeed a Pendragon.”

"Did you know- what he was?"

The smile fades from Elsa's face. "Yes," she says. "And no."

"Mother-"

"I was a water elemental," she says gently. "Vortigern- then, I knew him as Gorlois- was one of the fire enclave. He was very handsome. Witty. In the beginning- of course I liked him. He was very easy to like. But then Mordred attacked the water enclave and when I was supposed to die, Vortigern rescued me." Her eyes darken. "Mordred wanted me very badly. I was so powerful, and a leader for the younger water elementals; he would have tracked me to the ends of the earth to ensure I didn't rally a force against him. Vortigern not only saved me, Catia. He offered me his name."

Catia sags. "And you took it."

"Of course I took it. I was grieving. I was mad with terror. When offered the protection of the House of Pendragon, why wouldn't I take it?"

Of course. There are protections that come with family and their name, because there are magics that can only be done by those of one clan. There are protections that come with taking no name at all, and walking in fey lands without fear. There are other protections that come with relinquishing those protections and the debts they come with. And choosing another name, with the blessing of one of that house? Well, there's a reason why Camelot had been built so quickly and yet so strongly.

House Pendragon is strong. It always has been.

"And that's it," says Catia bitterly. "You loved him forever after."

"I," says Elsa, slowly, deliberately, "was terrified. No, child, that is not an excuse. But it is an explanation. And I knew my responsibility to the water enclave, no matter if it was sundered and spread thin as a peasant's blankets."

"What responsibility?" Catia asks. Her throat hurts, all those fears tangled up again. All that grief. All that loss. "I don't know what's happening to me. Why this is happening. What  _responsibility?"_

Elsa flicks her hands, and the water obeys her as if it's an extension of her body. Three strands rise and start braiding themselves, Elsa twitching her fingers thoughtlessly. “An elemental is a human with the power to craft the elements themselves to their will, Catia. It is dangerous. It is painful. It is difficult. But the joy! Oh, that is unmatched by all else in the world. There are implacable forces in this world, and with this power? You will be one of them." She folds her fingers into a strange symbol, one that thrums in Catia's chest. The water around them freezes into ice. The braid- it shines. "When I wed him, I was so desperately furious. No marriage can live on such terms, and I had no wish to spend the rest of my life bitter with it. The night before I accepted him into my bed, I went to a little stream near the castle and swore an oath in blood and water."

Catia closes her eyes. She remembers-  _there are stories of the vows of mothers._ A flame-ridden god telling her,  _you are the daughter of Elsa, and that means something._ She thinks she knows what is to come, though she doesn't dare to speak it aloud. It takes all of her courage to look up; to meet her mother's gaze.

"My child," says Elsa softly. "For the price of forsaking my duties of protection and vengeance against those who destroyed my enclave. A child, to bear the mantle that I abandoned." Her face twists. "And to offer them even a chance of doing the task I set upon them, I surrendered my powers. To you, Catia. I gave it up because I was not powerful enough to stand against Mordred, nor then against Merlin. I was not brave enough."

_And you think I am?_

"And if I don't want it?"

_If I am not brave enough either?_

"Then we are all lost," says her mother. "These are not things with choices. These are paths written into the skies and stars. Our destiny. We can forsake it, but always does it return. Your father put a knife in my chest the night that Mordred died to kill Uther, and that is how I ended, Catia: the same death as you, fifteen years before. You may run; you may give up now. But the daughter I saw in Camelot's walls and the woman I see before me now would not have been able to bear flight. Not when Camelot needs her."

"I," says Catia haltingly. "I- yes, I suppose. I've never loved anything like I've loved Camelot."

_I wouldn't know what to do with that kind of love, if I ever felt it._

Elsa smiles, again, bright as a sunrise. “Oh, Catia. I was so afraid, when I left- that he would make you into something that you are not. Or worse, that he would make you into something that you  _are,_ and that person would be cruel, and empty, and unfeeling. If I’d known how you were born to water- I would have spent many long years far more content.”

“What do you mean?”

“That if you were your father’s daughter, you would have broken before him. That if you were mine, you would have become worse than him.” Elsa’s joy shines like a sunrise. “That because you are yourself, and stronger than us both, you have taken the pieces of him that were strong, and the pieces of myself that bent, and built yourself an armor that can withstand the force of the world.” She reaches out, traces Catia’s wrist. “He loved you, you must know.”

And abruptly, Catia is angry. Furious. She is- how  _dare-_

“Do you think that matters?” she blazes. “Do you think that forgives him of the knife he placed in my chest?”

“No,” says her mother simply. “But it does not change that he loved you. It was not enough, but- he  _did.”_

"As he did you?" she asks furiously.

Elsa sighs. She doesn't look hurt, nor sad; just worn, and a little disappointed. It makes Catia deflate. "Your father was cruel. Terrified, in his own way. Ambitious. I did not love him and he did not love me, not as you are thinking, certainly not in the beginning- but do you know how difficult it is, to live besides another for five years and not grow to love them? He irritated me; he tried to control all of what I did, and who I met; he loathed his brother and his brother's wife so deeply that I often wondered if there was room in his heart for me at all. He saved me as well. He brought lilies into my rooms for three months, because they were the flowers of mourning in the water enclave. He killed you and he killed me and I will never forgive him for any of it, but when all those you have known for all your life are slain by a monster after you? Would you not reach and hold the first kindnesses given to you close?"

Catia swallows. "I don't know," she says, more honestly than she'd thought. "I stood behind him during- terrible times. I don't know how I forgave him of that. I don't- I don't know."

 _I never questioned him until he put a knife between my ribs,_ she thinks.  _I don't know if that makes me as selfish as him. I don't know if there is anything I can do to wash those sins from my soul._

She shakes away the rest of it. Looks at her mother, who has tears in her eyes, and feels her heart twist. But she cannot do her duty and be a dutiful daughter, and it is clear why her mother is here. If it falls to Catia to hold her to it, she will. By all the gods in the skies- Catia  _will._

"What responsibility did you have, Mother?"

Something glints in her mother's eyes, like a star flaring; like a light so bright it ends up ashes just a breath later. 

"When Mordred attacked us," says Elsa slowly, "we were the first. The worst. Earth and air faded into that from which they came. Burrowed into the earth, flew into the mountains. But we of water? People know where the rivers are. The lakes. The ponds.” Her eyes meet Catia’s and dip away just as fast. “We wish for the sources of our powers. And once we know what it is to be with our power, we would rather die than leave it.” She sighs. “And so, we of water died in droves. But the others, of earth and air- they faded into the high mountains, the countryside, and never surfaced, no matter how Mordred set traps and baits.”

Catia’s fingers tighten in the water, aching. “You’re saying they’re alive.”

“Oh, Catia,” whispers her mother. “So few. One enemy we might have survived, but two? Merlin hunted us like we were animals. But.” Catia jerks at the sudden tone of her voice, at the fierce joy. “We  _survived.”_

“If you lived-”

“We survived,” corrects Elsa. “But there is a difference between hiding your true nature to survive and being free to exercise your power. We survived, yes, and now- now we can hope for more.”

“More,” murmurs Catia.

Her mother lifts her chin, hand warm, so warm. “You are an elemental Pendragon. All the other women of your dynasty were fostered out, do you remember? Kept silent. Hidden. Mages don’t keep records of women, did you know? Silence. Time and time again, we were silenced. But  _you,_ you are a Pendragon woman, raised to your family, raised to a crown. I know what your father dreamed of. There has been  _enough_  silence, Catia.”

“This is- big, Mother,” says Catia. But when she imagines it, deeper than the fear and the nervousness, there is something light and bright as a bird’s flight, spearing through her. “This is larger than anything that any of us have ever wrought.”

“The first Pendragons carved out a kingdom on the back of dragons. Is this so different?” Elsa kisses her brow when Catia snorts in the back of her throat. “Yes, you are no dragon, I know. But you, you are a phoenix. Something high, and mighty, and unkillable. Hope, to all who will see you.”

They do not look alike, Catia and her mother. Catia’s eyes are darker, and her hair lighter. There is some sort of an echo, she thinks, in their high cheekbones and pale skin, but even then- Catia has received equal measures of both parents’ looks. Of both her parents. Her father the monster. Her mother the mage.

She doesn’t know if she’s enough.

Catia has never known.

But-

 _I will beat you._ A promise, hammered out in silver, liquid light. A vow. An oath.  _I will beat you, all of you, at this game._

“Do you know what you must do now?” her mother asks, a mage’s magic glowing around her. 

Catia smiles. Reaches forwards. Tangles her fingers in her mother’s.

“Do you like to sing?” she asks. Her mother’s face softens, and Catia nods. “I do. I always have.”

“Catia-”

“I love you, Mama.” 

They embrace, damp and waterlogged and still unendingly warm. Catia thinks-  _if I die here, I die happy._ But she is not just her mother’s daughter. She lets her eyes close. Lets herself breathe in the scent of water, warmth, love. Then she reaches out, and, eyes still closed, shatters the loveliest dream she has ever had from the inside.

...

When Catia wakes, she sees- the sky, above her. She tries to move but her hands are tied above her head. It’s an awkward position; her shoulders ache, and her neck twinges so sharply that she gasps when she moves her head. Slowly, she twists so that she can figure out where she is.

It’s in the shadow of a tree, propped up without thought. Her arms and face sting- she isn’t certain if Merlin’s explosion had done more than deafen her; if it had scarred her face, though she supposes it might be just from exposure to the sun- and there’s something being constructed in front of her.

Something triangular- some kind of a platform.

Catia tilts her head up, ignoring the pain in her shoulders and neck. She squints through the bright sunlight to look for Merlin.

Then, as if by magic-  _ha!_ she thinks, half-hysterically- he appears before her.

“Elemental,” he says. “Ah. You are awake.”

“Merlin,” Catia replies. 

“Do you see this?” he asks, waving a hand behind him.

She clenches her fingers around the rope, tight on her wrists. “I see- a pulpit. For your preaching?”  _Irritate them if you cannot win,_ she reminds herself.  _Irritate them until you_ can  _win._ “Have your people not heard enough of your hypocrisy?”

“This is not my doing,” says Merlin, slowly. “I have never killed a mage for public enjoyment.”

 _Not a platform,_ Catia realizes, suddenly, heart skipping, stuttering, in her chest.  _A pyre._

“No,” she agrees venomously. “But how many have you killed quietly? Tell me, does the Dagda differentiate between quiet murder and public murder?”

“I will meet my death with open arms if it means there are no others with the kind of power that you and yours have wielded,” he says. “You, Pendragon- it will end soon, all of it.”

“With Romans in Camelot’s sacred halls,” Catia whispers. “Why you loathe me, I understand. But the King? You will turn him against all mages with this, if you fail. You will- you will destroy it all, and you will not ever be able to take it back.”

Merlin sweeps his hands together, and Catia feels the surge of his power buffet her hair, pin her against the tree at her back. “The Pendragons have failed the mages already, too many times to speak.”

“They’ve failed the mages just as much as you have,” Catia spits. “What will you do, Merlin? When he invites you in with bread and salt and a smile? Will you forsake the laws of hospitality, the same as Mordred?”

“I will not,” says Merlin. “I go to Camelot to retrieve something of my own. Vortigern held Camelot better than any of his forefathers, that is true; but before him, do you know what kept the Romans from entering your borders?”

_Oh._

Oh, this is bad. This is- this is bad, this is so bad that Catia can scarcely breathe from all her fear. Not her own fear, though; fear for others. For all the roads of her home that will run red with blood.

“The sword,” she says, closing her eyes.

Merlin says, satisfied: “The sword. Made of my staff. My right, nothing more and nothing less. And without the sword? Camelot will fall soon enough. Without the sword, they are nothing more than a land of mountains and farmers and too much pride. They will fall.” He steps forwards. Catches her chin, the same grip as her mother, but colder. Crueler. “You are the price for the joining of my army to the Roman’s. One elemental mage, burned alive to show the world what we do to traitors. Your death shall achieve much, elemental. Be glad for it.”

He turns and strides away.

Catia stares at his back, and she hates.  _Hates,_ like she has never hated anything before in her life. Her hands shake with her terror. Her mind has gone white and barren as a field of snow with it.

But:  _I will not end here. I will play this game._

 _Watch me,_ she had thought in a cave, bracken water still in her lungs, hands so cold her fingers had been blue with it.  _Watch me if you dare._

Every Pendragon before her has been a man to watch, and admire. Every Pendragon before Catia has blazed so brightly that the very world bent to them. Her mother had survived floods, monsters, the death of her people. Can Catia do any less?

Up until now, she hasn’t moved water without moving her body. It hasn’t worked. No matter how she tries, it just- doesn’t.

But then, Catia hasn’t had so much riding on her doing it before.

She closes her eyes.

Breathes: in, so deep that her chest feels like some sort of a balloon. Then out, swift as an arrow’s flight. Her heart beats, loud in her ears. In. Out. In. Out. In-

Catia crooks her fingers.

...

The world is awash with blood.

That's all she knows: water, screams, red, red, red.

...

When the last of her mental fog finally clears, it is past dusk. The sky is still not dark as true night, but dark enough that the horse she’s riding is unsure of the path. Catia, too, is tired; she’s shaking and cold from everything.

Stiffly, she slips off of the horse’s back. It’s taller than the horses that Catia’s used to; slimmer, too, though she thinks that her own horse back in Camelot would likely have panicked far more than this Roman one. She grimaces at the ache in her upper thighs before stumbling to the packs on the horse’s back.

A weight on her back reminds her: Catia hadn’t just stolen the horse. She’d snatched up one of the packs that had been abandoned and dropped into a fire. The strap- it’s charred. There’s a burn on her forearm from where it had dangled.

But inside?

Inside- Catia wants to cry, with the sheer relief- there’s a soldier’s rations and a woolen blanket and best of all, a knife, wickedly sharp and small.

She eats the cheese as she cuts the rope away from her hands. There are bruises there, or the beginnings of bruises. For a long minute, after the rope drops away, Catia bends her head forwards and lets herself crumple, just a little, into the soft fabric across her knees. She’s so damned tired.

But there are leagues to travel yet, and stories to weave, and a kingdom to save.

 _Her_ kingdom.

Catia gets up. Ties the horse’s reins to a branch nearby. Sets her back against the same tree, takes the knife, and starts cutting the blanket into strips. If she’s going to save Camelot, she’ll need to look the part.

...

She’s lost, Catia realizes, the next morning.

She doesn’t panic. It doesn’t matter. And even if she wishes to leave- Catia knows her duty. There’s only one place she can go now, to save everything she needs to save. So all she does is kneel- just kneels, presses her palm to the soil, and listens for the water underground to beat in time to her heart. When Catia looks up, there is a flower unfurling before her eyes: white, glowing, ethereal.

There is a line of flowers, guiding her home.

...

Before she rides into Camelot, Catia braids her hair. She has a hastily stitched dragon on the back of her cloak- which is, of itself, half of the blanket that she stole from the Romans. She doesn’t even have shoes; everything she’s wearing is either from the drowning, or a gift from the mages. It itches.

If anyone spends too much time thinking on it, they’ll realize all the pieces that don’t slot together.

 _It’s fine,_ thinks Catia, hands shaking around the reins, bruises ringing her wrists, face stinging and raw, feet callused from hours walking on rough ground,  _I just won’t stand still long enough for them to realize._

She bends over the horse’s neck. Camelot is so close- Catia can almost smell it, the smoke, the stink of people. Her home.

She digs her heels in.

She leaves her fear behind.

...

Catia blows past the first portcullis.

She hears them shout; but she cannot stop. This is perhaps the most dangerous part of her plan: if they don’t recognize her, if they shoot to kill. Catia doesn’t know if the people are still as nervous and shoot-first-ask-later as in her father’s rule, though she’s fairly certain this new king isn’t quite so paranoid.

Hopefully.

She pulls short in the middle of the courtyard. The large doors are opening; Catia keeps her hand close to the opening of her watergourd, tied securely to her waist. It’s as close as she can come to a weapon without antagonizing them. There’s people aiming at her from he parapets. Guards surrounding her, advancing closer with each breath, bristly as a porcupine.

 _Are you a Pendragon or not?_ she hears her father snap. Catia tries to speak, but her voice fails her. She scrapes up the nerve- thinks-  _Oh, this is really stupid. Why did I-_

But the first Pendragon had climbed these very mountains for a night and a day and a night once more, and in the red light of a bloody dawn, he’d entered a dragon’s lair. He had said:  _Sometimes stupidity and bravery wear the same guise. Sometimes the only difference between the two is success._

And Catia is as Pendragon as they come.

“Romans,” she cries, mouth so dry that it hurts. “Romans are coming!”

She slides off the horse. Staggers a little, then regains her balance.

There are so few faces around her that she recognizes.  _No,_ Catia tells herself.  _You must remain strong._ Let the guards point their spears at her. So long as they don’t actually puncture her skin... does it matter?

“Did you hear me?” she demands, when nobody replies. Calls on her height, her lessons, to look at them as imperiously as her father. “There are Romans in the roads! Brigands, and thieves, and-”

“And who might you be?” a voice asks her.

Catia lifts her head.  _Ah,_ she thinks, fingers twitching in sheer shock. This-  _this,_ is what her father had always dreamed of being. Tall and golden. The crown sits so easily on this man’s brow that it would not even need to exist for Catia to pick him out of the crowd.

The water sloshes out of the gourd in response to her jerky fingers, and knocks her out of her contemplation.

“I am Princess Catia,” she says crisply. “And who are you?”

Straightens. Pulls the cloak around her. Lets everyone see the white dragon. Tilts her chin back, drops her eyelids until they’re regally half-lidded. There is more to being a royal than any clothes or accouterments. What matters now is this man seeing it.

“Arthur,” says the man easily.

Catia almost hisses through her teeth. “Then,  _Arthur,_ do you think me a liar? Or a fool? I know who attacked my escort. There are more Romans in these lands than have been for near a decade. You must act, and act now.”

“And why would I listen to a woman who- might as well be a Roman spy herself?”

He turns, as if to go back to his stupid ledgers and daily minutiae. Catia doesn’t need to pretend to be furious-  _Roman spy!_ she thinks, suddenly so angry that she quite forgets about all the spears around her.

 _“I_  am the Princess Catia of Camelot,” she bites out, and has the immense joy of seeing him stiffen. King Arthur is listening to her. To  _her._  “This is my home, and you will not disgrace it by naming me a Roman!”

Arthur’s hand is on his sword when he turns back, but Catia doesn’t let her eyes flick to that threat. If she believes she’s safe, then she will be.  _Sometimes the world is more dangerous when we believe it to be dangerous._

Just breathes. Stares. Breathes.

“Princess,” he says, and Catia knows what he’s asking, even if nobody else does. Even if he doesn’t.

She lifts her chin. If this is her death- if this man will kill her, like her father would have done to him- then she will not meet it with her head down. When she speaks, her voice is soft- so soft- simply because she cannot bear to speak louder without it wobbling, and she would rather die than let this man, this father-killer, hear her voice falter.

“Yes,” she acknowledges quietly. “My father was Vortigern.”

...

Arthur bundles her inside, quickly, as if he’s worried she’s at risk of being killed by some over-vigilant sentry. Catia lets him. Her mind feels numb, and her fingers are cold, and she shivers as she walks through halls that are decorated so differently from just a few weeks previous.

It’s- brighter.

Vortigern had liked austerity in color, but not practice. Black and white and every shade of grey between; all in the most luxury that could be found. His robes had always been lined with the thickest, finest furs; every year, he commissioned another crown, dripping with imported jewels.

In the hurried pace through the halls that Arthur sets, Catia thinks this king is far more about the functionality of pieces than their looks. Though he must understand the importance of looks: his overcoat is rough, likely common in origin, but the color is a blinding white, purer by far than any commoner could afford to maintain.

 _You’re babbling,_ Catia tells herself firmly.  _Think. Do what you must, but do not do it thoughtlessly. Your lies must be perfect. Your truths must be flawless._

_You cannot afford anything less._

She sits down on the chair that he gestures to, and takes the proffered cup from a blonde woman nearby. It’s tea: dark, with just a dash of mint. Just the way Catia likes it. Her head jerks up at the realization, and meets Maggie’s pale eyes.

Immediately, Catia looks away.

The lies will be so much harder to a familiar face.

Arthur’s shut himself into a chamber that just leads off of this one, with a number of his advisors. The door’s ajar. Catia can hear every word, even if it’s muffled.

 _How didn’t I know?_ he’s shouting.  _A cousin- Vortigern’s fucking daughter- how the fuck didn’t I-_

A chair crashes against a wall, the wood splintering loudly. Catia jerks to the side, startled, and the tea spills over her hands.

Maggie’s there, immediately.

“Shh, now,” she says, wiping at Catia’s palms, gentle and easy. “I’m sure it’ll all work out. Arthur will take care of you. You’ve nothing to worry about on that score.”

 _Unlike Vortigern,_ Catia fills in silently.

She’s so- and she doesn’t know if- and-

She makes a decision. Lies are more difficult to a familiar face, but it doesn't matter. Catia's done more terrible things, more difficult things, than even this.

“I didn’t- know,” she says aloud. Sips the tea, and glares at her hands until they stop shaking. “When the armies came- the birds and the horses and the dogs- he said, ‘You’ll be safer away from here.’ So he sent me to Ratae. But then I heard that the fighting was over, so I decided to come back, but then- the Romans came.”

The lies are- so thick. So ugly, down her throat. Catia closes her eyes. Swallows.

Maggie’s hands grip Catia’s tightly. She says, “My dear girl-”

“I didn’t know any of the others,” sobs Catia, and this fear at least is real, is true. “But then I was alone, all alone, and they told me they’d burn me alive, they were building a pyre-”

“Enough.”

Catia looks up, and there’s a dark-haired woman standing at the door. 

 _Mage,_ scream every last one of her senses. Catia scrabbles for a modicum of calm in response. By the time she does, the woman’s swept into the other chamber. As soon as she enters, the room falls silent.

“The princess speaks truly,” she says. “Romans are close. We must tighten security. King: do you remember when we spoke of your trial period?”

Something scrapes across the stone floor. Then Arthur says, heavily, “You said the people’d never love me as much as they love me now.”

“Your trial is over,” says the Mage. “Your tasks begin.”

“You  _know_ why we cannot impede that in-flow,” snaps another man. “You demanded it yourself! How do you want Merlin to enter if you block the roads by which he can?”

“Merlin will manage,” says the Mage. 

But Catia hears it only distantly, through the roaring in her ears. If Merlin is allowed inside- she remembers the way his hand had felt, so tight on her chin. Her disgust, her helplessness. If she’d failed even a little... she shudders. Catia tries to mask it as a shiver and takes a long sip of the tea, but it’s only lukewarm now. It scrapes along her throat as it slides down.

“Send guards,” says the Mage. “Send guards, and set checkpoints. Camelot has stood long and fierce against Roman tyranny. You will not fall now.”

Tiredly, miserably, Catia huddles in on herself.

...

But she cannot sleep.

Catia has her maids burn the rest of her clothes- why should she make it easier for the Mage to smell Merlin’s magic on them? Catia’s heard the stories of her, the skinchanger who led Arthur and his men to victory against Catia’s father- and she also knows a lackey when she sees one.

When the maids leave, Catia is in a warm bed. It’s dry, and clean, and smells faintly of juniper. She closes her eyes. Presses her head against the swan-feather pillows that her father had specially sown and brought from a Cherusci trader. Tosses, and turns, and finally abandons the soft bed in favor of the balcony.

She stares up at the stars.

 _This is going to be harder than I imagined,_ she tells them, silently.  _A mage is here. Merlin’s mage. Arthur will believe himself in his debt, because the mage is responsible for his throne. And so he will not believe that there is a threat coming from that side._

 _I am so tired, Mama._ She reaches out and runs her finger along the marble railing of the balcony, watches beads of condensation rise and gather in the wake of her finger.  _I am so sick of myself._

Catia’s could have told them, couldn’t she?

The truth is far more unbelievable. But if she’d just shown them a glove of water- they would have had no choice but to believe it. Only... then what?

Her father killed her for more power. But that power was not enough, because his nephew wielded a sword more powerful than Catia’s death. And now there is a mage coming who will strip Camelot of that very sword and also raze the castle and her lands to ash.

 _Did I forgive Father by not telling them the truth?_ she would ask someone, anyone, if there were anyone in all the world that she trusted. There isn’t, though, so she only tilts her head back. Sighs.  _I don’t know._

It’s not enough.

“I miss you,” she breathes.

It hurts. Of course it does. And here, back in these rooms that her father stabbed her in, it hurts far more. But all of the hurt in the world doesn’t change the fact that she loves him. That for every moment that she hates what he did to her country, to her family, to  _her-_ there is a moment in which he gave her the tools for which she is now going to save it all.

Catia turns and leaves the balcony, the marble dripping water as if it had just rained.

...

It is difficult being back in the place in which she was killed. More difficult than Catia had anticipated. Mostly, it translates to the fact that she cannot sleep, but it also means that her appetite wanes if she has to take her meals in her rooms, or in a place where she suddenly remembers  _how-it-is-supposed-to-be,_ and no matter how Catia tries to change that to  _how-it-used-to-be,_ it’s absolutely a losing battle.

The others think that her lack of appetite is because of Arthur, or so Catia suspects.

She hasn’t seen him since he pointed at a chair and then fled to the antechamber. The first few days were fine, perhaps coincidence; it is a big castle, and there are exponentially more people in it than Vortigern had ever maintained. But a week? Two weeks?

Catia doesn’t know how to tell them- she’s viciously glad, because she’s still so furious at the man who killed her; she’s also pragmatically glad for her people, because Arthur’s definitely a kinder king, even if he isn’t quite so efficient as Catia’s father; she’s also sad, and angry, and curious about this new king whose court is made up of more commoners than nobility. Caught in such a maelstrom of emotion, Catia thinks she’d rather end up doing nothing than attacking him, or crying on him.

But because she cannot  _say_ any of that aloud, she instead takes to hiding in the library.

It’s fine.

It’s  _fine._

Her own home, run over by mages and washed-out knights with superiority complexes and a king who would rather make his cousin feel  _better_ than confront her about her suspicious activities, and Catia is hiding in the library rather than trying to fix any of it. She wants to shout at someone just as much as she wants to curl up in a ball and sleep, and she wants to sleep right up until she walks past the flagstones in her room that haven’t been completely scrubbed of blood. Her blood. So she reads, and reads, and reads, and if it isn’t healthy-

Well, it’s a miracle that Catia’s alive.

All else pales before that.

...

It is- a week later, or perhaps a fortnight, when Catia finally mets her cousin again.

She’s asleep in the library, head pillowed on a sheaf of hymns on the first Pendragon. A hand touches her shoulder and Catia startles awake, and a leather-bound set of maps of Camelot and nearby islands falls to the floor with a resounding crash. Catia hears a voice- “Augh, apologies- La- Princess-” and it takes her a long minute to realize that the voice isn’t a random guard.

She lurches to her feet and performs some kind of a half-curtsy, nearly knocking the papers into a candle before she catches herself.

“Your Majesty,” Catia says, trying valiantly to hide the exhaustion in her voice. “I- wasn’t expecting you.”

“And I wasn’t expecting you,” he returns. There’s an awkward pause, in which he takes in all the books surrounding her, and Arthur clearly doesn’t know what to say. “I didn’t know you enjoyed reading so much.”

“It was one of the only diversions I was allowed,” says Catia.

She winces. Clearly she’s still asleep; it’s the only excuse she has for bringing up her father. For bringing up her life with her father. Arthur has been graceful and kind through this whole endeavour, but it only takes one sharp word for him to turn her out of this castle, and Catia has no idea what she can possibly do then.

“I... don’t enjoy it,” says Arthur cautiously. “But it seems that it is a necessity for kings.”

“Ruling is often ledgers about horses, and not riding them,” she quotes. Smiles, a little thinly. 

“Yes. Well. It’s not like I was ever trained for it.” He snorts. “This ain’t ever going to get better. But I’m still here. God, it’s like a play for fools.”

Catia swallows, and studies this man closely. He doesn’t look like he’s regrets what he told her. But how can anyone not want the throne of Camelot? It is like- like Merlin turning into a villain, or a mage being the most trusted of all of Arthur’s advisors.

 _The world hasn’t been right for a long time,_ thinks Catia sourly.

“My father should have wed me off years ago,” she says, running her finger down the soft leather spine of the maps bound together. “The Pendragon kings of old would have wed me off to a mage-enclave. Used me as a bargaining chip for peace, and never considered anything otherwise. Do you know why my father did not?” 

“If you say that it was because he was a better man, I’ll show you what that man did to half the people of Camelot.”

Catia smiles, slowly. “I’ve never believed my father to be better than he was,” she says. “No- he kept me at his side because he raised me as his heir.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Arthur.

And this, this is why he is a good king. Arthur doesn’t shy away from saying he doesn’t know something. He asks, and most of the time he sounds stupid, but all that means is that he’ll be underestimated.

“Only princes are given an education in politics, and maths, and languages,” Catia tells him. “Princesses- we are tutored in embroidery. Languages, sometimes, if our betrothed’s are foreigners. Comportment and kindness and the best way to curtsy for all classes of people. My father insisted I learn both, because he had no other children.”

Princes who would wed princesses of Camelot had already been scarce, because Camelot was quiet and small and quite clearly going through a revolution. Nobody had ever been certain of Camelot’s wealth, or its size, because it was just so- remote. Hidden away in the seas, a land of high mountains and little more. And princes who would come to Camelot, who would take Catia’s name, who would become a king-consort in all but name?

There had been none.

“Sounds like a tough life, for a kid.”

It had been.

But Catia shrugs. “I had books. And birds- I always loved falconing, and when that became too dangerous I had my sparrows, and robins, and owls. Full cages of them in my rooms, until I let them go. It wasn’t so bad a life for a child.”

“Easier than scrounging for scraps in a brothel,” says Arthur darkly. 

“Of course.” She doesn’t look away from him, from the sudden shadows thrown by his sharp, hollow cheeks. She wonders if that makes her brave. “But then, easy doesn’t mean good. You have something to your name, clawing out of that place. A crown.”

_What do I have?_

_A father who tried to kill me, and a mother with an impossible mission, and a world that didn’t know I was dead until I returned to life._

“A crown I don’t know to wear,” Arthur says. “It is- well, you must know. I think it’s clear enough to everyone, even the people who don’t have any clue of how a ruler should rule. And you know.”

“My father isn’t a good model for anyone,” Catia points out gently. “I think, if you’re doing something different... it is a good thing.”

Arthur leans back. Appraises her, before saying: “He taught you to rule?”

Catia pauses. “The- basics. As much as it can be taught.”

“The person who has the most say right now is my mage,” Arthur tells her flatly. “She is a good person. She is- effective, and efficient, but not what a kingdom scared into the shadows needs. The person who is leading the other part is Goose-fat Bill, whose ideas about honor can honestly go and dive off a bridge, they’re that fucking irritating. Excuse my language?”

“Excused,” says Catia, a little numb from the flood of words.

Arthur continues: “I need someone who’s gonna be at least a little balanced. Someone who knows the people, and how it was, before.”

“A fresh start is good,” she counters, regaining a little feeling. “After what happened-”

“A fresh start’s fine,” says Arthur, “until you realize that the fresh start doesn’t know jackshit about what they’re doing! Better we have some guidance instead of bumbling about in the dark like we have been!”

She has a mission. She has a  _mission._ It cannot be compromised because this man is asking her for help- because Catia’s life’s purpose, everything she’s ever trained for,  _might_ come in use now-

“They’ll never trust me,” she says desperately. “Not with one bit of power. You know who my father is, you know-”

“I know that you haven’t been scraping and begging for power,” replies Arthur, raising one brow. “A fortnight, and you’ve spent all your time by yourself. Haven’t once tried to foment rebellion, as Bill put it yesterday on those traitor’s posters. And it isn’t like we don’t need the help.”

He is handsome, this man, but- implacable, too, which Catia hadn’t expected. She thinks she should have. No man can seize a crown without being indefatigable, unstoppable.

She doesn’t know how to refuse.

“Very well,” says Catia. She sounds hesitant- she  _is_ hesitant- but in the tips of her fingers, in the depths of her belly, there are small sparks of excitement bursting to life. “Very well, King Arthur. I shall see you tomorrow.”

...

The next morning, Catia dresses in blue.

She braids her hair. Pinches her cheeks. Forces herself to eat some of the bread that the maids left- it’s still warm and soft, but Catia can barely choke it down. Whenever she can, whenever she forgets for a moment, for half of a moment, the guilt comes back twice as bad. The hatred. The memory of pain: a knife sliding between her ribs, and her father’s sobs, and the numb, all-consuming silence in which he’d taken her down to the caves. She’s learned through hard experience that she’ll then spend the rest of the day useless, half-nauseous and on the verge of both tears and hyperventilation.

But it won’t do to walk into a meeting with Camelot’s most powerful advisors looking like an urchin in fine clothing. It certainly won’t do to walk into a meeting and faint halfway through because of lack of food.

So Catia chews, and when she finishes, she laces up her boots and walks past the very spot in which her father stabbed her, and Catia doesn’t falter even a little.

...

When she enters, the room isn’t full yet.

Two men sit arguing in the corner. One is dark-skinned, shaved bald; his beard is going silver. The other is the man that Arthur had said led the second-most powerful faction of court: Goose-fat Bill. The man who’d loved Uther, loathed Vortigern, and spent all fifteen years of Vortigern’s reign ensuring that Vortigern never forgot that fact. Catia’s entrance silences the other conversations- there are a few others, scattered across the council room- but those two don’t seem to notice anything.

She folds her hands together and stands, quietly, as close to the walls as she can get without actively pushing against it.

“Wessex wants furs, Bedivere, not promises!” Bill bites out, just low enough that it’s clear he doesn’t want others to hear; just vicious enough that the whisper carries. “Tell me how you intend to procure that for him if we’re spending all our time and money on welcoming- fucking  _mages!”_

Catia wants to cheer for him. She works on maintaining a blank face instead, eyes trained on the large round table in front of her.

“You heard what she said,” retorts the other man, just as sharply. “She has heard that Merlin wishes to return. We know not to stand against magecraft- you and I both know that it will only help if we accept it. Merlin is already an ally. Wessex can retain his neutrality if-”

“You’re early,” says Arthur.

Catia turns to him. “Punctuality is a good habit for a king,” she says, without inflection. Then, a little softer: “And, of course, I wanted to hear about your redecoration. I have never seen a table like this before.”

“It’s one of my best ideas to date.”

 _And modesty is one of your best traits to date,_ is on the tip of her tongue, acidic and far more familiar than the situation warrants. But when she only hums in response, she thinks- there’s a slight hint of disappointment in Arthur’s eyes.  _Ah. So you not only wish for familiarity, you do not know how to treat allies who don’t offer that to you._ No wonder he’s so awkward around the Mage. She’s about as approachable as an iron maiden would be to a prisoner.

It doesn’t matter. Catia is not here to make him more comfortable around her.

She cracks her knuckles in the shadow of her sleeves. Steps forwards, and braces her hands on the edge of the table. People are watching her, here, Bedivere and Bill and all these other knights who have carved and clawed a name for themselves, and it has been so long- almost never- since she’s been  _seen_ and not ignored.

It feels... good.

...

But: her sleep cycle doesn’t get better.

Her consumption of food doesn’t get better.

None of it gets any easier.

(She doesn’t know why she’d hoped in the first place.)

...

“You- are you alright?”

Catia exhales slowly. “Yes,” she says.

“It’s only- the maids- Maggie says you aren’t eating.” Arthur frowns at her, at the books stacked high around her varying from old, illuminated manuscripts to journals on how the first Pendragons tamed dragons. “And whenever I come in the night, you’re here. So you aren’t sleeping. That’s not... good.”

“I’m fine,” says Catia. He looks doubtful, so she continues, sharply: “And if you’re the one entering the library in the night, that means you’re not sleeping either. Please, spare me your- your  _sanctimony.”_

“I only worry because you’re my family,” he says, stung. “The only family I have left.”

Gods. Isn’t that a reminder of something?

Catia squeezes her eyes closed. Then she closes the book with a resounding thud, and rises to her feet. She’d hoped for some more time, but sometimes- sometimes that isn’t possible. And Arthur deserves this piece of knowledge. It isn’t something she’s allowed herself to even consider in the scant weeks she’s been here, but now-

The moonlight is bright and silver around them. Her heart is swollen with all her griefs, and she hasn’t even managed to mourn for any of it. But the night air is cold, and Arthur is in front of her, and he is her family, her equal, in this pain.

“Very well, then,” she says. He looks confused, but not frightened.  _Good._ “Follow me.”

...

The path they take is winding.

Catia’s only been there a handful of times- once a year, on her birthday; sometimes, rarely, on her father’s birthday; mostly by herself, though he’d accompanied her when the mood took him. But the path from the castle is imprinted in her memory.

She regrets not taking a cloak. It’s cold, and colder still during the night. When she looks behind her, she sees that Arthur hadn’t thought to bring one either. He’s not shivering- just hunched in on himself, like that’ll help anything.

“You’re sure you’re not going to kill me?” he asks, pitching his voice to be heard over the wind.

Catia laughs, a series of giggles that barely make sound but leave her shoulders shaking. “Worried, Arthur?” she asks, and it is a taunt, yes. Familiarity is easier in the night, when the only witnesses are the moon and stars. “No,” Catia tells him, finally, voice singing like she hasn’t wanted to do in weeks. “I’m not trying to kill you.”

Finally, they stop at the base of a hill. A little stream flows around it, so small that it dries out in the summer and appears only in the weeks after winter. There’s two stones, so worn that the words carved into it almost cannot be seen.

She kneels and presses a hand against the one closer to the stream. Her shoes are in the water, and her feet feel numb with the cold. She hasn’t been this close to a river since Merlin told her of water-poisoning. But this stream? This is not water that she can be afraid of. This is-  _hers,_ fiercely, undeniably. Even if all else were taken from her, this little home of water and grass and stone and sky will be hers.

“Do you know what this is?” Catia asks quietly.

Arthur kneels. Brushes a hand over the gravestone, and clears it of the creepers growing over the words carved into it.

“Ygraine,” he reads. “A mother, a wife, a queen. Died three nights hence from the summer solstice, in the last year of King Uther’s reign.” Arthur looks up at her. “Who is this?”

Catia’s throat hurts. She doesn’t look back at him; instead, she stares at the other grave. Reaches out her other hand. Points out the words carved into it:  _Elsa. Our love will last until the seas dry and the stars dim. Died three nights hence from the summer solstice, in the last year of King Uther’s reign._

“This is my mother,” she says. “Elsa Pendragon.”

“And this is...” says Arthur.

“Ygraine of Cornwall,” says Catia gently. This, now, here, is a tragedy, for is there a child in all of court who cannot recite the king’s lineage? None, save for the king’s own son. “Who came to Camelot in the twenty-seventh year of King Gormant’s reign, and wedded the first prince a scarce two years later. Who became Queen to Uther’s King, and bore him a son named Arthur in the very first year of his reign.”

“No,” says Arthur. He’s gone white down to his throat, eyes like dark, furious pools. “No- he wouldn’t-”

“Your mother,” Catia tells him, implacably. “And mine, beside each other for eternity. According to my father- they were friends. Sisters, even.”

“Who would want to be sister to the wife of a monster?” Arthur snarls. 

Catia lets go of the grave. Her hands fall in her lap like two dead doves. She doesn’t know what her face sounds like, but the water around her ankles freezes into ice.

Into her silence, Arthur softens, a little. “I didn’t know she was dead,” he says.

It’s supposed to be a sort of apology, Catia thinks. For lashing out. But the night breeds familiarity, and contempt, and she doesn’t care about how ugly bitterness looks on her, a princess with nothing to her name.

“Why?” she asks, low and harsh. “Did you think she was in hiding as well?”

_Did you think that I haven’t lost everything you’ve lost?_

“Catia,” says Arthur, hesitantly. His hand closes over Catia’s own, warm and large and somehow softer than Merlin’s. It’s the first time she’s heard him say her name. It’s the first time anyone has touched her in weeks. She keeps her wrist limp, but lets him hold it. “If I’d known- I’d have- I didn’t mean- it’s- you’re  _family.”_

His grip gives her the courage to speak.

“My father killed her, I think,” Catia confesses, very softly. “He killed his brother. His brother’s wife. And my mother died that same day, for another reason?”

No.

This is what she’s been fearing. This knowledge, in the dates carved onto her mother’s gravestone and the gravestone next to hers. Catia wants to throw up with the force of her horror, and her rage. She is so tired. She never once asked for this legacy, but Vortigern foisted it off on her. She is just- so tired of this hate. Time and time again, this hatred.

“Family never mattered much to the Pendragons,” she whispers. Still she isn’t looking at Arthur. Still, her boots are soaked through. “Did you know that your mother was supposed to wed my father? The betrothal fell through. Because Uther fell in love. Because our grandfather loved Uther more than Gorlois, and so instead of a wedding, Gorlois was sent to a mage enclave.”

_Where he met my mother._

“We all knew him as Vortigern,” says Arthur. 

“That’s the name he earned with the mages,” agrees Catia. She tips her head back to look at the stars. So bright. So small. “But the name his father gave him? That was Gorlois.” Her throat hurts. “Uther was kinder than my father. But he was a warrior. And kings of war do not make for kings of peace.”

“Why did you bring me here?” asks Arthur.

Catia wants to cry. She- not  _wants,_ is going to- so she breathes through it, until her voice isn’t thick with it; so that they only drip from her eyes.

“That’s not what you want to ask,” she says instead. “Ask me, Arthur. I promise, I’ll answer.”

He sighs. “I don’t think-”

_“Ask.”_

“Why’re you here?” 

 _I could go anywhere, and I’m here._ Catia reaches up and swipes at her eyes angrily.  _I could hate you, and I do not. I am here, and I am showing you things that you would rather forget, and I am not sorry for any of it. How dare you think that it might be easier to start anew? How dare you think of doing the easy thing?_

“I’m here because this is mine,” she says. “I am unwedded. I am a burden. Do you think I don’t know that? A princess who is beautiful, but not so beautiful to have songs sung about it. A princess who is smart, but not so smart as to defeat any monster with her wit alone. A princess who is kind, but not so kind as to have her people’s love. A princess who is brave, but not so brave as to stand against usurpers or convention or even her own  _father._  I am a burden to you now, and I was a burden to my father before you. But this, this is what you do not know.”

Catia turns. Holds Arthur’s hands in a bruising grip.

“This is  _mine._ Oh, Arthur- that is what I was raised for. Do you think I know anything else? Do you think I want anything else? Camelot is my home. Camelot is more than that. It is my blood and bone and breath. Let the rest of the world dissolve into ashes. I will not be lost so long as Camelot holds fast. This country, this city, is mine. And that is why I’m here. Because there is not another place in all the nations of all the world that I would go to, not for all of the gold and blessings in the heavens.”

She lifts her head, and smiles. In another time, and another place, it might have been soft. In this one- it hurts. It is as sharp as the blade at Arthur’s waist. She’s so tired of the hate. She will- she will peel it away from her, from him, this second skin that they’ve grown comfortable with. There is more to being a Pendragon than this viciousness. Catia is certain of it.

“You are my cousin. You are worried that I will move against you. Hurt you.” Catia bends her head until she can rest her forehead on their entwined hands. “On my mother’s grave, on  _your_ mother’s grave, I swear to you: I will not.”

She looks at him, finally.

Arthur’s eyes are shining. He looks carved from marble- frozen, flawless. So beautiful. Catia does not love him for who he is, not yet, but rather for what he represents, what he can represent: a family. Her family. Pendragons on the throne of Camelot, who are kind and not cruel. Who are rulers and forgers of peace, not solely of war.

“Why have enemies when you can have friends?” asks Arthur, just louder than a breath.

Catia laughs. The idea of Arthur is as alluring as the reality, and she thinks for just a moment, for less than a moment, of kissing him. Pressing her lips to his, letting the ice around her soften into slush, into spring-water. But they are not like that. Not yet, maybe. Not ever, maybe.

Catia is surprisingly content with that.

...

It doesn’t become easier, after that- not her eating, not her sleeping, not the wary silence of all the other people of Camelot- but Arthur changes, and having a person that she can at least smile at softens the rest of the loneliness that Catia’s been feeling for the past months. The past years, if she’s honest.

 _Equals,_ thinks Catia, watching the sun rise, standing behind him in court, laughing in a garden for no reason but the ballooning lightness in her chest,  _he is mine and I am his, and that is all that it is._

The last Pendragons.

Whatever that means.

...

Catia knows, of course, how the servants whisper behind her back.

Not just the servants. The guards. The commonfolk. Even some of the visitors, from other countries.

Vortigern’s get. A monster in pretty clothing. Traitor, traitor, traitor.

Catia hears:

_How could she be princess and not know?_

_How could she be princess and not care?_

_How dare she walk in and want what she had? Don’t you know that there are no happy endings for women like you? Don’t you know that your pain is deserved, your suffering is worthless, your-_

_We have judged your life, Princess Catia Pendragon, and we have found you guilty._

She wakes, gasping, and it is afternoon in the library but she is shivering.

...

There is not a soul in the world that knows of all of Vortigern’s crimes but her.

Who do they think stood behind him?

Her father wanted an heir, and an heir he had. Until this mess with the Born King- Catia was his prodigy, his mirror, the girl of sunlight and feathers with a ribbon of steel down her spine. Catia loved him. Catia watched as he cut out tongues, as he sent dissidents into slavery, as he increased taxes on a broken people. Catia did not know of a way to not love him.

She is his every crime, carved into flesh. Harder than her mother but softer than her father. Love does not set her free of any of that; it ties her down. Her-country-her-family-her-throne.  _This will all be yours one day,_ he’d said, before stabbing her.

She will never forgive him.

She will never stop loving him.

...

Left to their own devices, her people will burn her at the stake.

...

Catia loves them still.

No. Catia does not know of a life in which she does not love them.

...

“Do you hate them?” Arthur asks her, once.

They’re atop a windy bluff. Wagons are trundling into Camelot, slowly, stopped and searched and then let through. It’s been a rough spring; snowmelt from the mountains has already broken through two embankments, and the flooding has caused even more people to come to Camelot for shelter. But the majority of those entering now are mages.

Catia frowns, stamping her feet in a vain attempt to bring back some warmth. Dry heather crunches under her boots.

“No?” she says. “Why would I?”

“Vortigern hated mages,” Arthur points out mildly. 

“He hated people of power,” Catia returns. “He wanted- it all to himself. So he could dole it out to those who pleased him. So others would worship him. Love him.”

“People ended up afraid of him.”

“He compromised,” says Catia, shrugging, and Arthur breaks away with a laugh. 

He compromised.

When he knew that Catia would be his only heir, when he knew that she would never be his in temperament- he’d compromised. Kept her, and trained her, and formed a world for her that should have been enough. His entire life, he’s compromised for the better thing, for more power, because one thing is worth more than the other, because right  _now_ it does matter, and-

And Catia, dead at his hand, cold down to the bone, thinks:  _how sad._

...

Does she hate mages?

Oh, Catia is terrified. She is too frightened to face her dreams at night, and too frightened to tell others of her family’s sins. She cannot walk too high. She has not gone near a river since she found out that it poisoned her, even though the want itches in her bones. She dares not walk in the village alone. She can scarcely breathe when thinking of a pyre, and bindings around her hands.

But she is nowhere near as afraid as her father was, for the entirety of his life.

No.

She does not hate mages.

...

No. It is simpler than that. She is not her father. The mages are of Camelot, and she is Camelot. They are  _hers._ Everyone in all the world is asking the wrong question:  _do you hate them? do you hate them? do you hate them._

If someone had asked  _do you love them?_ Catia would have smiled, and she would have sung out:  _yes._

She would have sung out:  _I do not know of a way to not love you._

...

One night, she wakes, and her chest is cramping.

It  _hurts._ Catia turns, and waves a hand, and it does not even take a moment for water to fly out of a pitcher near the door and form a glove around her hand. The pitcher falls, shatters on the stone floor, but Catia barely hears it over the still-twisting ache in her chest. She rises. 

Stumbles to the door. There is something calling her, and Catia knows enough to know that she is helpless before it. So she lets herself be guided by the call, and only surfaces enough to keep herself from making too much noise; from calling attention to herself.

Out of the castle she goes, down a small, well-worn trail that she’d treaded with her maids too many times to count. 

Catia knows where she’s going, now, and it throbs in her chest. 

She’s avoided the river so long. Even after escaping Merlin’s camp- Catia had taken the long way, winding, because it didn’t cross the paths of any rivers. She hasn’t come here once. Not to this meadow, this little clearing in which she first traveled away from Camelot for the first time in her life. 

What if it makes her mindless once more? 

If the price of being a water-elemental is that she will want to leave her home, then Catia does not want to be a water-elemental. 

The price is too high. She  _refuses._

Catia fights, then; she severs the call that’s emanating from the river and clenches every muscle in her body. Sinks to her knees, battles through the first wave of pain. Then the second. Then the third.

She’s crying by the time the fourth wave of pain washes over her.

Her hand twitches, and Catia feels something wrap around it. She looks up. A white flower, glowing from within. It’s bent, and touching her wrist, and the pain is leeching out of her with it. 

“I,” she says, in a gasp, “I- I don’t want to.”

Like an echo, so faint she can barely hear it:  _you must._

“You can’t make me.”

Sunlight, so hot the flowers wither and die. Rains, so heavy the mud is washed away from the roots. The earth shakes and roots are left shredded. Heavy-booted armies trample all over flowers and the very stalk is crushed.

_You will die._

“I am Camelot,” whispers Catia. “I will not leave it again.”

A vision: a dying people, choking, broken. Children screaming for water. Hollow-eyed mothers. A woman in blue gems and brilliant robes, hands held high, calling down a storm.  _If the water is not there, you take it. You are Camelot. Camelot is not the land._

“You’re saying- I have a choice?”

_Always._

Catia crawls the last few paces and lets her hand fall into the river. She’s sobbing, she realizes, distantly, hunched in on herself, great gasping sobs that rip through her chest and leave her throat raw. The pain fades from her, eases from the tip of her throat to her shaking, trembling fingers. She thinks-  _I could lie here forever._

It’s a warm night.

Or- not warm, but it’s warmer than it had been a week before, and only a little over a month before that, it had been snow, all the time, everywhere. Slowly, Catia turns over so she’s lying on her back. The stars aren’t visible overhead. It’s going to be a cloudy day; it’s already a misty night.

“I will return,” she says, and rises, brushes off the dirt on her knee; swipes at her eyes until the evidence of tears is gone. “I won’t stay so far for so long again.” Then, an afterthought: “Thank you.”

But then she hears a noise behind her. Something scraping, too deliberate for the quiet chaos of a forest at night.

Catia whirls around, the water rising along with her. She holds it in a sharp, pronged grip, just enough to lash out. 

“Who’s there?” she calls. Nobody answers, so she continues: “Come out before I spit you on this-”

A shadow makes its way out of the treeline. Catia stiffens. The wave she’s holding in check starts to freeze with her sheer shock. But the shadow then splits into three, and Catia pulls the water around, takes two steps back to let her feet be surrounded in lapping water, lets the wave rise to about two handspans above her head. 

The shadows- stop.

It shrinks- Catia realizes, abruptly, that they’re kneeling. It’s dim around them, only the moonlight illuminating the clearing, but Catia can see their faces clearly when they throw their hoods back. Her hands tighten into fists at the sight of the last: a little girl, no more than ten years of age.

“Who are you?” she asks tersely.

“Mages,” says the man, each word measured and deliberate. “Come to beg for sanctuary.”

Catia pauses. She thinks- No.  _Impossible._

“King Arthur is offering sanctuary,” she says. “Nearly a thousand have come. I can take you to the-”

“You misunderstand,” says the woman. She rises and pulls back her sleeves.

Blue stones shine. 

Catia inhales sharply. “You’re elementals. Water elementals.”

“As are you,” says the man.

“Do you know who I am?” Catia demands. 

“We do,” says the woman. “Daughter of Vortigern. Water elemental.” She lifts one eyebrow. “Advisor to the Born King.”

_“How could you possibly know that?”_

The man holds up his arms. “Peace, my lady,” he says, and he sounds alarmed.

Catia’s hands tremble, holding up the water, stiff from the pain of before. But she stands fast, and strong, and proud.

“Can you not hear it?” asks the woman, hushed. “The rivers are singing.” 

The man presses a hand against her shoulder, but his eyes are just as bright. “Only to those who know to listen.” 

Catia shakes her head. “I don’t understand. I was told you were dead. That you were slaughtered, because you were near rivers, near lakes-” 

“And when the river flows under the ground, it is invisible. But does that mean that it does not exist?” The man smiles. “We are few in number, that is true enough. But we are not yet finished.”

“The rivers are singing,” says the woman. “Have you not heard it? They’re telling all of us that there is a queen in Camelot once more. They’re saying-  _rejoice, return, hope is reborn amongst the children of the sea.”_

“Wait,” says Catia. “Wait, you came here for me?”

A protest is on the tip of her tongue, but she remembers her mother’s words:  _you, you are a phoenix. Something high, and mighty, and unkillable. Hope, to all who will see you._ Catia swallows instead, and stares at them, these three people who have survived monsters and death and all the cruelty that Catia can imagine; at these three people, who have crossed mountains and valleys to come here for a life beyond survival. 

“There has been imbalance for so long,” says the man. “Camelot was built on magic, and there has been none in the Pendragon line for more than a century. But you... a mage-queen in the heart of Camelot? The world is set right once more. Why would the rivers not sing for it? How could we hear that and not wish to return? This is our  _home,_ lady Catia.”

 _We can now want more,_ Catia thinks, and is dizzy with it, the painful pride bubbling in her throat.

She tilts her head to the side. The wave she’d been holding up has frozen solid, a clear, glassy sheen to it. And the moon is just high enough to reflect off it. For the first time in ages, Catia sees her reflection.

She’s grown thin. Her hair is a dark, loosely braided mess down her back. Her face is hard, all angles like a cut jewel. There’s shadows around her eyes, deep and dark, and she knows that just a few months previous, she’d been far prettier. But she also looks fierce. Ferocious. The scars of her life these past months is clear around her face, written into the hard-won steadiness of her eyes. She had once been far more beautiful, but Catia thinks she’s never once looked this regal.

What was it that they’d called her?

“A queen in Camelot.” Catia looks at the woman. “That’s what you’d said. But- I’m no queen.”

The woman hesitates, then she reaches out and propels the little girl forwards. “If you don’t believe us- there is a way to listen to the rivers, my lady,” she says. “But I am not so powerful as Elaine. She has the gift stronger than either if us by far. If you would let her show you, then...”

Catia nods and beckons the girl forwards. As an afterthought, she lets the ice melt back into water and drop into the river. Elaine looks up at her. There's something familiar in the curve of her eyes, and something strange, disquieting, about her magic. Catia bears through it and kneels, sliding her hands into Elaine's. 

"The first time I heard this," says Elaine, silver-gilted in the moonlight and heartbreakingly small- "I was alone in these caves- all alone, and lost. And I wanted to hear something so badly. So badly." Her eyes are large, dark, and there's something old and haunted in them, no matter the actual age. Some tired, bitter horror. "The river wants to be heard. It's always singing. If you listen... it's there."

Slowly, Catia lets both their hands be submerged.

It takes her a minute. The song  _is_ faint, like something out of a dream. Light and soft and almost drowned out by the rest of the river. But threaded right underneath is a melody like the beat of a river in the pulse of a forest.

It is singing.

_The mage-queen has returned! Balance is struck, rejoice, rejoice, the hope has come back, rejoice and return, children of the sea-_

In the time of the first Pendragon kings, the men had not had magic, but their wives did. Every king had wed a mage, and so the magic and magicless peoples had been united. 

Until Catia’s grandfather.

A sundering, a cleavage. Something broken in the heart of a kingdom. In the heart of _her_ kingdom. And Catia can fix it. She listens, long, hard, until the song of the river feels embedded into her bones.

She  _is_ the fix.

“You need shelter,” says Catia quietly. 

The woman nods; Catia turns, rises to her feet. It’s her responsibility, now, to give it. Catia pauses. Thinks back, on long sunny afternoons in the library. Pages which she’d barely skimmed. Traditions which she needs to follow. Traditions older than the Pendragons; things that have been written into the fabric of Brittany’s history, of lords and their sworn followers.

Of the responsibilities of each to the other.

These three- they haven’t offered their magic for Catia. But they’ve traversed entire kingdoms to come to her, and they’re waiting, still. They’re waiting to see who she is.

They’re waiting to see if she is worthy.

_I know what to do._

“It would be an honor to host you,” Catia says, stilted. Formal. “I have not wood for a table or coin for bread, but a hearth that is lit and a roof for your heads. I ask you to partake of it.”

There’s a split moment of surprise on their faces, before the man sweeps into a bow. “We would do so gladly,” he says.

Catia nods. “Come,” she says. “There is a tower near to here. If you do not wish to be found- I can think of no better place.”

Arthur’s condemned the tower to destruction, though at a later date.

Vortigern had built that tower. Vortigern had dreamt that building a tower on the site of Mordred’s defeat would make him invincible, and he’d killed people there, time and time again. Mages. Elementals. Catia had stood behind him during those executions.

She thinks of leaving her home for the hope of a better life. She thinks of being forced from her home because of the power sitting in her bones. She thinks- Catia thinks she’s angry, angry, angry, like she’s never been before. 

She thinks:  _there’s no better way to destroy this legacy._

And is there any part of Camelot that belongs to her so inextricably? Is there any other place that is Catia’s more than Arthur’s now? 

“I’ll take you there,” she says, and takes Elaine by the hand.

...

By dawn, Catia returns to the castle. 

She is tired. But it’s a clean sort of tired, the kind that comes from working down to the bone. Not the kind of tired that came from tears or grief; just the satisfaction of a job well done.

When she enters her rooms, she sighs. The shards of the clay pitcher that had held her water are still on the floor, though there’s no water. Catia could leave it for a maid to clean, but there’s every chance that they might cut open their feet if she does. Not only that; they might even notice that there’s no water, that the pitcher is dry as if it hasn’t been used to bear water for a full fortnight.

Catia shrugs mentally, and gets to work.

Halfway through sweeping up the powdered pieces, a voice says from behind her: “This is a sight I never thought to see.”

She jerks. Three jagged pieces of the pitcher that she’d balanced on her thigh fall, and shatter into smaller pieces. Then Catia looks up and sees-

Goose-Fat Bill?

 _Do not call him that,_ she tells herself. It isn’t a name so much as a reputation. The proper way of addressing him is-

“Sir Bill,” says Catia. “I had not expected you.”

“And why would you? We have not spoken since you miraculously returned to warn us of a Roman invasion.” He sets himself against the wall, sardonic amusement clear in every line of his body, though his eyes are hard, and small, and look at Catia far too closely for her comfort. “Tell me, Princess, do you remember me?”

“No. Should I?”

“I was a knight, once,” Bill tells her.

As if Catia hadn’t known that. “Yes,” she acknowledges. “To Uther.”

“And to Vortigern.”

She feels herself go still, fingers sliding against a smooth curve of clay. 

“Vortigern and I,” says Bill, “were friends. Even after he deposed Uther. For almost six months he fooled me. Then, when I confronted him, he and his blacklegs threw me into their prisons and killed everyone I loved, and  _made me watch.”_ The raw, haunted look on Bill’s face fades, slowly. When he speaks, his voice almost sounds normal. “But before that- we were close. He told me of his dreams.”

“His premonitions, you mean,” Catia says tonelessly.

“Just so.” Bill advances on her, just one step closer. It makes fear rise in her throat, clawing and living and mindless. “That tower that he was building- twenty-seven levels, that is what he wanted.”

Catia rises to her feet, hands fisted in her skirts.  _Deflect. He doesn’t know- he’s guessing._

“Three into three into three. He dreamt it would bring him even greater power when it was finished.” She doesn’t dare look away. “He used to say- when it is finished, there shall be none that can stop me.”

“Ah,” says Bill. “So he did not tell you the truth.”

“What truth?”

“I had thought you would have considered it- but you were so young, and he was always so loving, I’m certain-”

“What  _truth?”_ Catia demands.

“Who ever heard of stone being sacred?” asks Bill, eyes flinty. “Tell me, Princess, when a place or a land or a tower or a grove becomes magical. Powerful.”

Catia hisses, fingers bending into claws. “Sir Bill-”

“With sacrifice,” whispers Bill. “Blood. A life spilled onto its stones. Vortigern would not have sent you away to protect you, Princess Catia. He would have taken you to his tower’s cornerstone and slit your throat. That, that was the man I knew.”

_The best defense is a good offense. Even if it is all lies, every last bit of it._

“Then you did not know him,” Catia flares. “He was not kind or good, perhaps, but he would never have hurt me. I am his  _daughter.”_

“Yes,” says Bill. “A daughter raised to rule, you say?”

She flushes dark. “Yes.”

“Hmph.” He leans back, slightly, and the almost unbearable scrutiny of his eyes lessens. “Bedivere says I’m too paranoid. Seeing things where there’s nothing to see. I say- it’s kept me alive this long. And now, it will keep my king alive as well.”

“If you’re threatening me, it won’t work,” Catia tells him coldly. 

One corner of his lip pulls up, casually, to reveal his canine. It might have been a smile on any other. “I’m not threatening you,” Bill says, pleasantly. “I am telling you- we’re in a bad ways. Camelot is bled dry, and half the gold’s gone into your father’s precious tower. Other half’s going to be used for helping out the floodings. Not a kingdom is ready to honor their trade treaties with all this upheaval going on, and that’s the only way we can keep ourselves afloat ‘til the summer crops come in. Believe me, I’ve looked at the numbers. We need legitimacy.”

“So, you’re saying-”

“I’m saying, I’ve seen the way you look at Arthur.”

“How dare you!” Catia asks, voice turning shrill. “How- I have  _never-_ imagine the rumor- the audacity!”

“Aye. The audacity. Don’t tell me arranged marriages are unheard of now,” says Bill dryly. “No, the king hasn’t been raised like you. He likes things all simple, straight.  _Why have enemies when you can have friends_ he says, day in and day out. Doesn’t once think that maybe those friends’ll turn back into enemies the second your back’s turned, and there’s only so many days they’ll stay in front of you. But you, and I, know how important this is going to be.”

“Give me one good reason to listen to you,” says Catia, voice still sputtering, trembling around the edges.

“Because we both know how important this is to save this kingdom.” He pauses. “And, of course, that no innocent princess would be out of her chambers in the night. Tell me, what would a nobleborn lady want with a condemned tower, if not to resurrect her father’s legacy?”

Catia knows she’s gone white. Her fingers are twitching; the water in the planters behind Bill are rising in response. She forcibly stills herself. "You had me  _followed?”_

“A good idea, clearly.” Bill’s lips tighten. “Princess, I’m certain that there is a perfectly valid reason for you to be wandering about those ruins past midnight.” His eyes glitter. “However- King Arthur does not see it the same way. If he were to find out...”

“Get out,” Catia bites out.

“A pleasure to meet you this morning, Princess,” Bill says, and bows smoothly.

“Out!” Catia shouts, and takes real pleasure in seeing him leave; in stalking after him and slamming the door closed.

After, she presses her head against the cool, smooth wood of the door. Everything inside her is a jumble; she doesn’t know which way is up. Which way is down. She’d thought she knew, but then the rivers started singing, and her world became at once larger and more complicated.

 _Gods guide me,_ she thinks, eyes closed, heart still, for just one more moment.

But Catia stood beside her father, and she learned to smile when all she wanted to do was weep. Her weaknesses are not the world’s right to witness. She was born for a throne, and she will not let any of her fears or misgivings take that knowledge from her. 

 _There is more to being a ruler than clothes and jewels,_ Catia thinks, and straightens.

When she leaves her chambers, there’s a smile affixed to her face, no matter the storm roiling under her skin.

...

A day later, Catia is accosted by two young men. One of them twitches his fingers, and the earth under Catia’s feet rolls. They look hunted; their bones are sharp and visible even beneath their robes.

“I hear it like a great pounding,” whispers the earth elemental. He's a nervous mess, all straw hair and gangly limbs. “In my dreams. Under the skin of the earth, as if it is another heartbeat.  _The mage-queen has returned.”_

Catia thinks she can feel the earth pitch beneath her, unsteady where it had once been firm.

 _Mine,_ she thinks, fiercely, furiously. 

“You’re in the right place,” she says aloud, lays a cool palm against his shoulder. Watches his eyes brighten. “There’s a tower here... yes, you’ll be fine. No other knows of it. Follow these flowers. They’ll take you there”

...

And so-  it begins.

...

Catia scarcely sleeps. But when she does, she dreams: a tower of fire and stone and ice and whirling air. Red and green and white and blue as the sky. Pure. Bright. Something that hasn’t been seen in the world for decades.

A dance, in the village square, water and flame and air and stone, in a glowing, glittering display. Skills that have been forgotten. Practices which have been abandoned. There was once more to elementals than power.

Catia dreams, and she dreams of beauty.

Of  _hope._

...

One afternoon, Arthur finds her in the gardens. He says, a little sharply, “Are you content here?”

Catia looks up at him. It’s bright outside; she’s blinded by the sun. She can’t quite make out the expression on his face. 

“Yes,” says Catia slowly. “I suppose I am. Well, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because I was told- someone- I realized-” he trips over his tongue. “Things have changed, a lot, and it’s easy to forget that it’s changed for you.”

Affection, alien and unwanted, swells in Catia’s chest. Goose-Fat Bill had the right of it, more than he knew, but also- he’d been wrong, utterly, miserably wrong. This- whatever  _this_ is, between her and Arthur- is not contrived or arranged. It’s something a little smaller, like those white flowers in her meadow. Far more fragile, and slowly unfurling. But when it is through:  _oh,_ Catia thinks, a smile curling over her lips.  _Oh, the glory!_

“You sound like you need a rest,” she says, halting Arthur’s poor attempts to explain himself. “Sleep, perhaps? I’m sure nobody would notice if you hid yourself in the library.”

“‘s that why you stay there, then? It keeps people from talking to you?”

“I do like the quiet,” Catia says laconically. “But I think you’d like the flat tables more.”

Arthur lowers himself to the ground and stretches out his feet. “Bah. Give me a proper city any time. These large rooms and no substance- it’ll give an honest man hives, it will.”

“Well, it’s not as if it’s very far to the city. Londinium is where you grew up, isn’t it? Not even an afternoon’s ride.”

“Not a bad idea,” says Arthur. His eyes are bright when he looks at Catia. “I could show you- there’s this- you know George, don’t you? Long hair, speaks with an accent, good fighter?” Catia nods, one lazy tip of her head down. “His old training center. He taught me everything I know. He taught it there. And- it’ll be nice to go see some of the people. Haven’t seen Lucy in- Bel, ages.”

He rises to his feet, and draws her up as well.

“Wait,” says Catia, alarmed. “Right now?”

“Free afternoon,” says Arthur, waggling his eyebrows. “No court, no meetings. C’mon. It’ll be a good time. Some proper food, drink- it’ll be good.”

Catia considers it- she’s read through the majority of the books that she’d wanted to, and it’s a beautiful day, all sunny and windy, none of the clouds that should be there during this time of year. And she’s curious, she’ll admit to that; curious of where Arthur grew up. His life before he became king.

“Why not?” asks Catia. “It’ll certainly be- an experience.”

...

It is. Catia eats a porridge so bland and overcooked it feels like mush. She takes one sip of the ale and coughs so hard she thinks she’s going to lose a lung. Arthur’s friends aren’t her own; they’re rough-hewn and scarred and quiet around Catia, until they forget to be wary of her and turn as boisterous as Arthur at his loudest.

 _How could you give this up?_ Catia wonders, drawing idle patterns in the wood of the table.  _King of people that you knew, in exchange for a crown that just- hurts._

She thinks: it is a different kind of love when you have spent a lifetime dragging a life for yourself out of nothing. Your teeth turn sharper, your claws a little deadlier, your chin is always upturned to find the next ledge above you. It is a different kind of love altogether when you have been raised with the knowledge that this kingdom is  _yours,_ undeniably, from this moment to the last. You’re always so afraid, born on the top, of the people clawing at you from below. 

But: it is love. 

Suddenly, she’s sick of it. Of bearing the indignity with a smile. Arthur deserves Camelot, perhaps, for being a better man, for being a better king. But what use does a heart have for deserving? What use has merit for a girl of nineteen summers cruelly cast aside?  _This, too, is something to mourn,_ thinks Catia bleakly.  _I have much to be grateful for. But also: so much has been lost. So much has been taken._

There’s a burst of noise from the people around Arthur, and Catia slides off her stool in response. He doesn’t deserve to see her so morose. Not when he looks carefree for the first time since she’s met him. Instead, she grabs her cloak, hanging off the back of the stool, and heads for the door.

Outside, the air hits her face like a slap.

It’s windy. It stinks of pigs and mud and dung, but it’s far fresher than the thick heaviness inside the bar. Catia rubs her forearms with her hands, shivering, and sets off. Arthur’s likely to be occupied for another hour or two, so she can explore.

Londinium isn’t Camelot. It’s larger, for one, and it doesn’t know Catia, for another. She’s just another girl with flowers in her hair and no money, walking around the stalls. After a little while, Catia finds a small alleyway- it isn’t much, though most of Londonium’s streets are winding and narrow- and slides into the darkness. She just needs some time to think, to feel sorry for herself. It’ll all be fine soon after that.

_Mama, you said it would be hard. I knew that. But did you know that it would be this hard?_

Catia sighs. Closes her eyes.

“I miss you,” she whispers. “I love you. I don’t know if that means anything anymore, but- I wish I had someone here. I wish it were just a little easier.”

Then she gets up.

Just as she’s leaving the alley, she hears screaming. It is as if a string is carrying the sound, and is attached to her feet. Catia turns to it, head cocked as if she’s a bird. The others hear it- Catia knows that they do, in their hunched shoulders and trudging feet- but she realizes that none of them are going to act, either. 

She has a water flask at her waist. Catia can only hope it’ll be enough.

She flips the hood of her cloak over her head and takes a deep breath before setting off to find the noise.

...

When she finally finds the source, she feels nausea surge in her throat.

It’s a group of air elementals, huddled together against an awning. A wagon train- Catia’s certain it’s the elementals’ wagons, going by the symbols painted on it- is burning up in front of them. A crowd is shouting at the elementals.

 _Not a crowd,_ thinks Catia, shoving her way past a man shouting something about  _Mordred’s fucking spawn_. 

_Not a crowd. A mob._

She’d come out of the maze of streets at the corner of the mob, so it isn’t too far to get to the front of it.

That’s when she realizes: the mob set the wagons on fire, but the actual shouting- that’s coming from one woman. She’s thrashing in the grip of two men. And she’s howling her grief.

It takes Catia a long moment to understand the words, because they’re in cornish, not the english that the people of Camelot speak. But then she does, and her heart twists like someone’s taken it in their hands and pulled.

_My son! My son! Please- I have to- my son!_

_Why isn’t anyone else doing anything?_ Catia wonders furiously, hands reaching for her water flask.

There’s a little boy in the wagon, and he’s going to die,  _die,_ because these people won’t allow their mother to save him? Because they think elementals are responsible for Mordred? Because they think this will make it right?

How dare they!

But her water flask will not be anywhere near enough. Not for a fire this big. Catia’s eyes narrow on the silver gleam behind the wagon; through the smoke- she thinks she can see-

The Tamesas is flowing behind them, and Catia takes two steps towards it- two steps out of the rioting crowd- before she breathes deep, feels the river’s roar in her bones, and twists her fingers together. Once, she’d done this while her hands were tied above her head. This is far easier.

Her hands don’t even move much. They just twitch, sharply, and the wave has risen, high enough to dwarf the buildings next to the river. Catia brings them down just as quickly, and the river falls onto the road, swamps everyone, including Catia and the wagon and all the people around her.

The wagon sits, smoking gently, in the resulting shocked silence.

“Tristram!” shrieks the mother, before yanking herself from the men and flinging the door open. 

She and a boy emerge out of it a scarce moment later, both coughing; Catia watches carefully until she’s certain that they’re not any further hurt than smoke inhalation. The crowd disperses, grumbling a little, damp and stunned out of their fury.

Catia waits until the majority are gone, then she steps forwards to catch one of the air elemental’s arms. Her unfriendly look slakes off, replaced with slack-jawed awe when she sees Catia’s face.

“My queen,” she whispers. “Was that- were you the one who-”

“Has this happened before?” Catia asks quietly. 

She realizes with a distant kind of surprise- her arms are shaking.  _She_ is shaking; like a leaf in a storm. Like something bent so far that it must snap back, now, with greater force than ever before.

The girl looks away. “It was- usually we are quicker,” she says. “And quieter.”

Catia tightens her grip on the girl’s arm. “It shouldn’t be like this,” she hisses. “It shouldn’t-” her words are cut off by the clanging bells in the clocktower; Catia hisses inwardly as she counts the rings and realizes that she’s been gone too long to go unmissed. “Listen,” she says instead of everything else she’d meant to say, “There’s a home-”

Two other elementals start forwards, and see Catia’s face; both pale, and kneel. 

“Listen to me,” Catia says urgently. “I must- I have to go. But there is a place that I am building, and it will be safer for you than any inn that you wish to stay in. I offer you that roof and hearth, for I have little else. If you wish to go there, it is yours.”

“You swear that it is safe?” asks one of the other elementals.

“Yes,” says Catia. “I do not know if anyone else will protect you- but I know that I will. For you. For your children.”

“Thank you,” says one, then the other; the mother looks up. Her hands are so tight around her son’s arms- Catia’s heart aches. Her father started this. She is- she doesn’t know what to do with this rage. With this helpless grief. 

“I will help you,” she tells them. “If you go there, you will be safe.”

Then she turns and leaves, because she cannot bear it for a moment longer, this bursting, ballooning sensation in her chest. 

...

Catia stops at an alley, breathless, airless, though she’s late. She is sobbing so hard she cannot breathe. She wants to claw her heart out of her ribs. She is choking, and she has no tears in her eyes, but she wishes she did. She folds in on herself, knees to chest, balanced on the balls of her feet, fists pressed against the stones of the alley, and gasps. When she rises- her nails have drawn blood from the meat of her palm. 

...

She slips back into the bar with Arthur. He blinks at her-  _where were you,_ written across his face- and Catia smiles as prettily as she knows how. She feels something else fill herself, thinking of Arthur living here, in these narrow streets, in these rickety homes. Thinks- how difficult to love this place. How difficult to learn to unlove it, once it creeps into your heart. 

 _I needed some air,_ she says, and her smile is true, true, true.

...

The entire ride back to Camelot, Catia’s hands sting on the reins from the flesh scored off her palms. 

She doesn’t flinch.

...

Catia sleeps, that night.

She dreams: fire, raging, higher and higher. Her tower of stone and brilliant color and hope, crumbling. Her mother gasping and keening as her life bleeds out from her. The glitter of tears in her father’s eyes when he pushes the knife between her ribs. The contortion of his face when he twists the knife. 

She wakes up. She is shaking; there is a flower at her side, and it is white, and it is glowing, and she wants to tear it up by the roots. She thinks of going to the library, but bile rises in her throat at the idea of being there- at the idea of all those pages burning. She thinks of staying in the room, but her every last bone feels like it might shatter at the idea.

_There is always-_

Catia looks up. The clouds shift for so brief a moment that she thinks she imagined it; but moonlight falls in her room, bright and silver, and her heart folds in on itself. It isn’t raining. Not yet.

 _How dare you think of doing the easy thing?_ she asks herself.  _You are the mage-queen, returned to Camelot. Yours is not to shrink and fear. Your life is- to rise. Always, no matter what tears you down._

The stone is cold under her feet. Catia walks lightly despite it, up and up stairs. To the highest tower of Camelot. To the owlery.

...

She remembers the first time a hawk took flight from her arm. Catia does not remember her mother, alive, laughing; but she remembers this. She remembers the wind and the promise of a storm; she remembers seeing the hawk fall as if something had killed it, only for it to rise once more only a few minutes later.

She’s splinted wings. Begged her father for the faster hawks, and spent hours training them. Messenger birds, and songbirds, and half a hundred others- but her favorite, always, has been a smaller one; one that the man who sold it- an old German trader- called a smeerle. 

Ever since returning to Camelot, ever since her father’s death, Catia’s avoided it. She is not here to enjoy. She is not here to accomplish anything less than her mission, and she is going to do that if it will kill her.

But- she misses her little hawk, so dearly. She misses her life when she would come here every morning, when she would feed the birds and tend to them. The simplicity of it. The ease. 

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers to her small, dark-feathered smeerle. “I missed you so much.” He nips at her fingers. Catia closes her eyes against the sting of tears, and remembers smoke, rising from the top of a wagon. Smoke, stinging her eyes. “I wish it was easier,” she tells him, and sinks to the floor, amongst the rushes and stink. “I chose this, every step of the way, but- gods, how I wish it was easier.”

It is somehow quiet, and peaceful. Catia feels something ease inside of her that had been tensed for too long. She strokes over her smeerle’s slender, quivering back, and she lets herself rest.

...

“Princess Catia.”

Catia jerks.

She’s been lost to contemplation for too long; what had been a dark night sky has lightened to an interminable gray. It will soon rain, Catia thinks, and she feels it like a sinking stone in her belly. She turns her head to look over her shoulder and sees the Mage.

A shiver runs down her spine, as it always does in the presence of mages. Catia doesn’t know why nobody’s recognized  _her_ yet, apart from other elementals; perhaps it has to do with her not being born a mage. Perhaps, in some small manner, the gods have helped her.

But not all mages are like this one. It is more than her sixth sense that tingles; it is dread, and disquiet, like something fundamental to the fabric of the universe has just come undone. Like a bone going sideways where it should go forward, and cracking in half.

“Mage,” says Catia, as courteous as she can manage. 

Most mages choose names. The most powerful have names thrust on them by the gods- Mordred had been one, according to legend. But there are a few who sacrifice their names to the dark. Who go a year and a day nameless, walking through fey worlds, protected by the shadows they’ve wreathed themselves in.

“Is there a reason why you are here?”

“I like to hawk,” says Catia. “Perhaps you didn’t know- but most of these birds were mine. All of them were trained by me.”

The Mage lifts an eyebrow. “And yet, this is the first time you come here.”

“I didn’t-” Catia cuts herself off and peers at the Mage. “How did you know that?”

“There are spells,” says the Mage flatly. 

Catia stiffens. “You tracked me?”

“I brought these cages up here,” says the Mage. “From the chambers you are occupying now, to the owlery. I could see how Princess Catia had loved them.” Her eyes flick to Catia’s, then back to the smeerle perched on Catia’s shoulder. “I did not need any magic to know that you did not.”

_A test. A test that I failed._

“Some things aren’t so simple as that,” Catia replies sharply. 

_Sometimes you are so tired of pretending that everything is the same- you would rather die than have another reminder of all that you’ve lost. Sometimes you are more than your loves._

“And that, I am aware of. But did you know, Princess Catia, that there is a way to sing truth out of stone?” There’s an amused cast to the Mage’s face, but it’s also bitter. Angry. “Tell me, what do you think the stones of Camelot sing of the Princess?”

Catia firms her chin; lifts it. “What do they say?” she asks scornfully.

“They say,” says the Mage, “that the princess is  _dead.”_ Her eyes are like the sky in summer, storms swirling, dispassion and fury held in equal measure. “You are a ghost wearing her skin, and I have no love of skinchangers.” 

“Though you are one?” Catia spits out. “Skinchanger, animal-walker; it doesn’t matter. I am who I am. I am the Princess Catia, and I am my father’s daughter. Nothing will change that. Least of all somebody who thinks that taking over the mind of some petty animals is high magic.”

Instantly, she realizes her mistake- the Mage is calm, always, but it seems that this is a sore subject. She reaches up to brush her hair back and her hand trembles. When she speaks her voice is so harsh that it feels like it scrapes over Catia’s nerves.

“I,” hisses the Mage, shaking, “am the prodigy of Merlin. The things I have lost- you can scarcely  _imagine-_ you, with your silks and your servants-” 

_As if that is all I am! As if that has lessened any of the rest of my grief!_

“What have you lost?” demands Catia. “A family? Whom do you think I have left? A purpose? What do you think I have left?” She is yelling, now, but her rage is too much to contain. She is so tired of swallowing injustices. Of silently accepting bitterness into her body. “An inheritance? What do I have  _left,_ that has not been stolen from me!”

The Mage looks stunned, then angry. Just as angry as Catia feels. 

“Stolen? I am- they took my father from me, and then my mother, and then my sister. For two weeks I was alone in a cave, and I could not walk, and I could not breathe, and I was not able to  _speak_ for my fear- do you know what Mordred did?” she shouts back. “Do you know the kind of fear that sinks into your bones? You ask- you  _dare_ to ask- what is left to you? This!  _This!_ You have a bird who will remember you, at least, and I had nothing! You cannot even understand the meaning of nothing!”

She slashes a hand down, and the stone wall to the left shatters out of existence, blowing a strong gale into the tower. Catia yelps in shock. The Mage scarcely notices; she’s still shaking, still glaring at Catia.

The Mage averts her face, panting. “How dare you,” she says, and it sounds- tired. Angry, yes, and hateful, and pained besides; but mostly just exhausted.

“If you thought me such a threat, you would go to Arthur,” says Catia quietly. 

“And Arthur would not hear me,” says the Mage, lifting her head. She looks marginally more in control, though her face is white and strained. “Not against you, the last of his family. Do you think I have not tried? Whatever spell you wove on him- I don’t know it, but it is strong.”

“You wouldn’t have kept silent. So you-”

“-went to Goose-Fat Bill.”

“Which was why he had me followed.” Catia closes her eyes. “It all makes sense.” The wind turns colder, shearing at her face like a knife. Catia thinks- it’s going to rain, soon, in the next few breaths.

“What I don’t understand,” says the Mage, quietly, even quieter than Catia had, such that she can scarcely hear anything, “is why you are here. What it possibly achieves.”

Rain peppers Catia’s face. They’re light, so soft, and they’re singing as well. Different than the rivers, a melody that’s higher and louder and faster; it takes Catia a moment to realize what they’re singing.

_Murderer, murderer, murderer-_

It takes her another moment to turn, and see where the rain is heaviest: the tower. Her father’s tower. Now hers.  _Of course it is,_ she thinks. These kinds of stories are circles, and Catia’s is one loop from her father to her and back again. She will never be free of him. She thinks that isn’t so bad; what matters now is what she makes of his legacy. Her legacy, now, more than her father.

“Tell me,” she says, to the Mage. “Just answer one question, and I’ll answer all of yours.” She doesn’t wait for the Mage to nod; Catia rushes on. She has no  _time._ “Were your parents elementals?”

The Mage freezes. “Yes,” she says, slowly.

“Who found you?” asks Catia, heart hurting. “Who saved you?”

“That is not-”

“It was Merlin, wasn’t it?”

The look on her face- it answers more than any words could have ever managed. “How could you know-”

“Because, I’m no ghost,” says Catia, firmly. She leans back, so her hands are braced on the stone sill behind her. All the books have said it’s possible. And if she dies, she thinks that this is the best way to go; from on high, spearing and graceful like her hawks. The wind, fresh, cold, on her face. “I have my secrets, that’s true enough. My father killed me. He wanted power, and thought that killing me would give it. But Bel brought me back to life.

“Merlin- you claim to be his prodigy. But do you know what he’s done? Do you know all the atrocities he’s committed? Knowing that- will you stand by? Will you let him continue?”

“He is the finest mage in all of history,” whispers the Mage. “He is a better man than you can claim, he is- he lives, he dies, by his code-”

“Perhaps he did, once,” says Catia. “Now? He’s a bare-faced killer.”

“Whom has he killed?” demands the Mage. 

“Elementals. Innocents. Time and time again, those he feared.”

“How could you possibly know that!”

Catia lifts her hands, and feels the clap of thunder like the rush of blood in her ears. The sparks of lightning like the fierce knowledge in her throat: this doesn’t end here. 

“Because I’m not a ghost, Mage, and I am the Princess Catia,” she says, eyes drifting closed. “But I am, also, a mage.” 

She takes in the unadulterated shock on the Mage’s face, and grins at her, before throwing herself- literally- backwards.

...

Catia died, until she didn’t. Catia drowned, until she didn’t. Catia ran, until she didn’t.

Catia falls, until she doesn’t.

...

Catia opens her eyes. The rain is holding her in a cocoon; it’s being levitated by her, and because it’s under her, it’s levitating her as well. She makes the mistake of looking down and flinches so hard that she drops a good three meters- but then she gets her head about her, proper instinct, and forces herself to still. Draws her hands up, and ascends through the air until she’s level with the shattered ruin of the owlery and the Mage’s wide eyes.

“I am a water elemental,” says Catia. Her voice softens, against her will, at the way the Mage is standing- she’s gripping the stone frame of the owlery’s window like it’s the only thing holding her up, and her cloak is fully soaked through under the rain. She looks very small, just then. “I know what Merlin is, for I have seen it. For I have experienced it. And now I ask you, Mage, whether you wish to stand by him who taught you all the skills you know, or me, who has lied to you from the moment I met you. Whether you will stand by a murderer, or you will stand by me, who will stop such evil from occurring.”

The Mage tilts her face up, but she doesn’t answer. Rain streams over her face like tears.

“Who taught you that?” she asks. “That is- a master’s move. No novice could know it.”

Of course not. Walking on rain isn’t something that can be done instinctively; it’s learned, done by ruthlessly battling instinct and fear to achieve something better than one’s animal motions.

“Did you think my forays into the library for only comfort?” asks Catia.

There is a reason why she’s been practically living in the library, and it doesn’t have all to do with a lack of sleep or the mutters of everyone in the castle. Camelot is the one place where neither Mordred nor Merlin could get a hold of the texts on elemental power. She’s heard- they’ve all heard- what happened to Essex’s mage library. The smoke, they say, rose so thick and so dark that it blotted out the sun. 

Catia’s spent two months now in Camelot, reading every treatise on the nature of magic and every scroll on the advancements of elemental techniques and every book on mage enclaves that she can get her hands on. 

Her ability to practice had been severely hampered, perhaps, but Catia’s nothing if not resourceful; she’d snuck away to her mother’s grave numerous times and spent full afternoons practicing the magic in that small stream, on that quiet hill.

“I thought you cunning,” says the Mage, quietly, looking a little shell-shocked. “I thought you daft, too. But this- I never thought you this ambitious.”

“Then will you help me?” 

The Mage lifts her chin. Her entire face has gone bloodless- where it had looked pale before, now it’s corpse-like. Her nails are digging into the stone frame, and she looks about two moments from shaking out of her skin.

Catia makes a decision. “I must go,” she says. “I don’t know what’s happening, but I fear- the worst. If ever you make your mind, I will be at the tower. The one that my father was building.”

She sweeps her hand up, and brings it down in a line to her sternum. It’s an old gesture: respect, patience, the balance of a sword to swing from hilt to blade. Friend or foe, we will meet again.

She turns, and lets the Mage slip out of her mind. Catia must find-

_There._

A group of soldiers, armor shining even from this distance. They’re gathering around the base of Catia’s tower. She wonders if they would have entered- checked, to see if people are there inside the tower- but no, that wouldn’t have crossed their minds. Certainly not when Catia’d done her best to keep those families safe, and installed them in the highest floors while flooding the lower ones. Once the air elementals had arrived, it hadn’t been much of a task to elevate even their wagons with particularly strong gusts of wind.

Catia can’t hear anything else now, though- just the screaming, howling chant of the rain:  _murderer, murderer, murder most foul-_

 _It’s not the rain singing,_ Catia realizes abruptly. If she hadn’t been so focused on the Mage, and the threat she represented, she might have recognized that scream of abject, unrelenting fury earlier.  _It’s a_ person.  _Someone who can make the water sing-_

Meaning one of the water elementals.

Meaning, most likely, Elaine.

Catia takes off. It isn’t easy, running a quarter-mile above the earth, head spinning if she thinks on it too much, constantly yanking the water above her- but Catia hears a little girl’s screams, and she cannot pause to think on her difficulties. Not now.

...

She reaches the tower and skids in through one of the larger balconies, completely soaked through, shaking.

“What’s happening?” she snaps at one of the earth elementals- he’s standing in her way, and looks pale and drawn under the firm set of his shoulders. 

“Merlin’s here,” he says. “He came- this morning. Early. Spoke to the king. The airs sent wind from there to hear, once they started marching on this place. He said-” The boy swallows, and Catia wants to take him by the shoulders, shake him until he spits it loose;  _she doesn’t have time,_ “-he said that he’s going to prove that he  _is_ Merlin, and to do it- he’s going to tear the tower down.”

_And none of you can leave._

Water and fire elementals had experience in fighting with their backs to the wall- water by necessity, fire by nature- but both earth and air enclaves had just disbanded and faded into the mists of the fens. It hadn’t been entirely successful, but far better than any water or fire enclaves’ strategies had been. It also means that with nowhere to run, the boy in front of her looks scared out of his mind. 

“Someone’s screaming,” Catia says neutrally. As neutrally as she can manage. “One of the water elementals?”

He winces. “Elaine,” he says. “She saw Merlin. None of us realized she was on the balcony, but when she did- well. After what he did to her family... I’d be screaming too, if I had to see him.”

Catia winces as well. She doesn’t know what exactly happened to Elaine, but she does know that the two people she's traveling with aren’t her parents; she also knows that Elaine’s the same kind of mage as the Mage, the kind that is visible and unsettling to everyone they meet. She can only imagine how dangerous that kind of a life must be.

“He won’t tear the tower down,” says Catia, with more confidence than she feels. But the boy looks marginally better for it, and that’s what she’d meant to achieve anyway. “I said I would protect you, did I not?”

He straightens, back stiff as a plank. “What d’you need?”

“Your courage,” says Catia. “Your strength. Stand firm. Remember: this is not your end.” She reaches up, and grips his shoulder. Sees the panicked, desperate question in his eyes-  _how do you know? How? How?-_ and says, “For I will net let it be so.”

The rain outside is so cold. Catia shivers as she balances on the tip of the balcony’s railing, then she lets go; straightens, graceful, tall. She steps off it, and the water is soft as a feather under her foot. The water is as solid as stone. 

Lightning flashes around her, and thunder rattles her bones, and Catia descends to meet Merlin and Arthur, a smile affixed to her face.

...

“Merlin,” says Catia graciously. She sweeps a curtsy to him, then to Arthur. “My king.”

“Ah, so this is where you hid yourself to,” says Merlin, ancient eyes narrowing in his too-young face. 

“Catia?” asks Arthur, looking like someone’s just slapped him in the face with a fish- stunned, and appalled, and both emotions quickly bleeding into suspicion.

“Where is safer?” asks Catia, eyes not wavering from Merlin’s. “I could think of none so well guarded as the heart of Camelot.”

“And yet you stand before me now. Camelot’s protection is not as famed as it used to be, I suppose.”

“If it was protection I wanted, protection I would have had,” says Catia quietly. “Camelot protects her own. Tell me, Merlin, do you know who I am?”

“Catia,” says Arthur, hand white-knuckled on his sword- his  _sword- oh, Arthur,_ thinks Catia, sadly, heart rippling in her chest, the screams of a haunted girl still echoing around her, hatred and rage like twin swords afire behind her, “what is this?”

“Yes,  _Catia,”_ says Merlin mockingly. “What is this?”

“Camelot protects her own,” says Catia. “You asked me what Vortigern was to me, Merlin. I answer you now: he was my  _father.”_ She takes a moment to savor the split-second of shock on his face; the restructuring of his world-view, his strategy. “Yes. Camelot protects what is hers, and I am Camelot.”

“You’re here to stop me?”

“I’m here,” says Catia deliberately, “because you wish to tear the tower down, and I will not allow that.”

“The tower is slated for demolition,” says Arthur. “Catia, I don’t know what you’re saying, but-”

Catia rolls her wrists together, and grips them tightly. She tilts her face up. Stares, hard, at Arthur, as the rain around them  _stops._

It hurts, like a pressure on her shoulders. Like she’s trying to hold up the sky. The rain wants to fall. But when it comes down to Catia’s will and the rain’s desire? She flexes her fingers and holds,  _holds,_  one breath, two, three, long enough for the soldiers to shift uneasily and Arthur to look uncertain. Long enough for Merlin to realize how truly powerful Catia is.

Then she funnels it into the river, down the cliff a fair distance away.

“I am a mage,” she tells Arthur firmly. “And I have hid things from you; I have danced around the truth. But one thing I have never done to you is lie. And I tell you now- this man is not here to help you. He will strip you of all that he can without violating guestright. He cares nothing for you or Camelot. And once that is done, he will invite your enemies to walk in.” At Merlin's snort, she challenges him: "Tell me that you don't have a Roman legion waiting just outside of the borders!"

“Then why is he here?” asks Arthur, cutting her off- though his hands tighten on the hilt of his sword.

He sounds more like he’s humoring her and less like he actually cares for her answer.  _This is not the end,_ Catia reminds herself, and clenches her fists, stands straighter.

“Because you have something of his,” says Catia. “Something he wants, dearly.”

Arthur wavers, eyes flicking from her to the tower to Merlin to the rain that’s coming down around them in gentle sheets. 

“Do you remember?” Catia asks him softly. “Until the stars dim. Until the seas dry.” 

_I will not turn against you. Whatever else- that much I know. That much I swear._

“What is it that he wants, then?” asks Arthur slowly.

“The sword.”

Catia sees what happens next, vivid as a tapestry in front of her eyes: Arthur makes a decision; Merlin’s hold on his temper breaks; particles rise from the soil at their feet to hover in mid-air; just before Merlin explodes them, Catia flings herself into the air.

Arthur shouts and falls, recoils, as the air around them turns to fire. The horses behind them scream; the soldiers are rendered useless in the space of a moment. 

Catia thinks she can admire the strategy. If your enemy cannot even see you, then how will they fight? It’s ruthless. Effective. Too bad that he’d shown that trick to Catia back in his camp. Too bad that Catia knows her rhymes:  _fool me once,_ and all that.

Too bad that she remembers her father’s first, and oldest, and finest lesson:  _irritate your enemies if you cannot win. Irritate them until you can win._

She rises, further, and feels the shards of a window explode into her back as Merlin closes his fist. 

A water elemental can properly flood entire floors, with a few judicious applications of pipes- not so the water-level is knee-high, but rather lapping at the ceiling. Catia’d installed the elementals in the top five floors of the tower, and she’d transformed the bottom three floors into lakes to make it harder for people to enter. 

She feels it now, with the window shattered by Merlin: water bursting out in a sharp, pressurized spout. Catia lets it fall. She takes it in, and feels the beginning of a strategy dawn on her. 

“They call you the greatest mage to ever have lived,” she calls down to Merlin. Her back is afire. Blood is dripping down it, she thinks; from the glass. Catia drifts a little to the left, hiding it as a spasm of pain. “But all you are is a murderer. At least my father  _cared_  for his people!”

Another window breaks, the metal frame tearing itself apart, the glass a hail of knives aimed at her body. Catia climbs higher with a twitch of her fingers and watches more water burst out of the tower.

“New tricks, mage,” she sings out. “Or I shall evade you once more!”

“New tricks?” snarls Merlin. “You think this a game? Look, girl- and see what a true mage does.”

He turns, one revolution, and it’s like the world spins with him. Like nothing matters but him and his. Catia clings to the sobs of the rain around her to keep herself aloft. That fury. That grief. Royalty means more than jewels and silks. Mage means something more than the powers they wield.

Catia feels the tower she’s staked out as her own crumbling. No, not crumbling- tipping. Merlin’s tearing up the foundation of the very tower. Catia swirls in the air and freezes the spouts of water still pouring out of the windows, so they form supports- solid ones, multiple ones; and it’s the work of a moment to break other windows, to freeze the water that emerges, to ground it into the earth.

But still, inexorably, the tower tips further.

 _"No!"_  screams someone from above. 

Catia jerks backwards, sharply, and watches something dark and small hurtle to the ground- she hears, through the thrum of blood in her ears, the rain take up the scream.

 _No,_ thinks Catia.  _No. No. No-_

She isn’t thinking when she reaches out and draws the rain into a net. Her hand extends; her nails curl in; and Elaine, small, trembling, thrashing with her rage, survives her fall long enough to seize control of that net of water. 

Elaine seizes control. Catia can feel the difference in the water- the way it hardens with purpose and hate. She lunges forwards to catch Elaine, but the girl’s too fast for her. Elaine’s rain-water turns to ice, then knives of ice, and all pointed at Merlin. Catia grabs her shoulder and Elaine stills, shaking so hard that she can scarcely stand upright.

“I know you,” says Merlin, slowly.

“Don’t you dare speak to her,” Catia lashes out at him, before turning back to her. She’s probably gripping Elaine too hard; probably leaving bruises. She can’t know for certain, and she can't care either. “Elaine, please- stop. You need to go back- this isn't safe for you here. You cannot-

She looks up at Catia, eyes red. Face white as bone. Catia stops talking. “I’m not letting him take my home again,” she says, in a whisper so fierce that Catia feels it reverberate in her ribs. 

“I know this magic,” says Merlin. 

Catia turns slowly, to meet Merlin’s gaze. To see Arthur, a few scarce feet away, getting to his feet. His eyes keep moving from Catia to Elaine to the tower to Merlin- he looks confused. Confused, but determined. Catia can only hope-

“I remember you, little girl,” says Merlin. His eyes are normal, but Catia thinks there’s a glow deep within them. Some other kind of magic, beyond that of elementals and shapeshifters. Something older, and simpler, all at once. “The stars sang of you. When I found you, I could not see for the brilliance in your bones. And how you fought! How you feared, and yet- how you fought!”

The knives of ice melt away into water, slip into the earth. Catia doesn’t need to look down to see what Elaine’s face will look like.

“Enough,” says Catia sharply. She steps in front of Elaine. She doesn’t look at Arthur, who’s slowly moving towards them. “You’ve said enough to her. You want a fight, Merlin? I’ll give you a fight.”

“Stop, both of you,” snaps Arthur. He’s unsheathes his sword. “There’s no need to act so rashly. Let’s all go back to Camelot and just-”

Even as he speaks, he throws himself at Merlin.

In a kinder world, the sword would pierce through Merlin’s chest. It would be poetic justice, for his sins; for his crimes. The staff he forged, slaying him. 

But instead, Catia watches as Arthur is blasted backwards. He hits the tower and lands, boneless, on the ground. She claws at her forearms- Catia cannot move without leaving Elaine, and she cannot stand to see Arthur so broken, either- later, she realizes that she’s screaming, one endless note of one more grief piled on her shoulders.

When she recovers, she’s on her knees.

The sword is hanging, glowing gently, in mid-air. 

Merlin reaches up and hefts it, and it shifts in appearance from a sword of steel and stone to a staff- smooth, tall, knotted at one end. Catia feels a low thrum of it in her blood as master and tool are reacquainted after so many years. She shudders at it.

“He thought to attack me with my own staff?” asks Merlin. “One I crafted by mine own hands, formed by my own power? I thought you Pendragons less foolish!”

Bile and defeat sink sharp fangs into the back of her throat; how can she win? How can she hope?  _You, you are the phoenix,_ Catia hears her mother tell her.  _The hope of the elementals. Every time you have fallen, you have risen once more._ And until it is over, until you are dead, you are not defeated.

“But we are not,” says Catia. She is shaking. She remembers Elaine behind her, and rises to her feet. 

There is a sheer cliff, not far from the tower. At the bottom of that cliff, there is a river. Arthur had once escaped Catia’s father by jumping into it. Now, Catia reaches for it. She reaches for the rain around her, the water in the soil under her feet. She closes her eyes until she can feel that river, her river, twinned to the beat of her heart, roaring like an endless, inhuman, vengeful god.

She summons it.

Like a blanket, the water rises.

Merlin whirls back to see Catia, and meets an entire river, summoned and held in check by her power and her will alone.

“You think to stop me?” asks Merlin. “Me, who has formed countries and sunk islands and slayed dragons?” He gestures to the army that’s rapidly backing away. These games of magic are not ones that they can win, not now that they’ve been reawakened to them. “You think yourself, alone, enough to stop me?”

“I can only hope,” says Catia. 

She has one last card to play now; one paltry, desperate hope. But it is alive, and bright, and she grips it in her mind like it will save her. Catia doesn’t look at Arthur, or any of the other soldiers slowly backing away from her. 

“You gifted that sword to House Pendragon. But you did not gift it to a king, did you, Merlin?” asks Catia. “You gave it to someone else. Someone who could wield its gifts of magic and power. You think to reclaim it now, for three generations have passed without one to wield it as it was meant to be used. Gormant and Vortigern and now Arthur- none of whom are its true heirs.”

“I do not think to reclaim it,” Merlin tells her. “I  _have_  reclaimed it.”

“Three generations have not yet passed,” says Catia. “We are in the third now.”

“Ha!” he laughs. “Who shall claim it, then? What enclave can name an heir? The enclaves are shattered. Destroyed. Magic requires promise, girl, viable promise. And with the sword being lost for the last fifteen years- I’m well within my rights to reclaim a gift unappreciated and disused.”

“There’s no need for an enclave. That was- tradition, yes, but not necessity.” Or so Catia hopes. Prays.  _Wants,_ viciously, terribly.

“And what does that matter in the first place?”

“Tell me,” says Catia softly, “who I am.”

Merlin’s eyes narrow. “Vortigern’s daughter. A water elemental. A-” he pales, abruptly. “A royal.”

“A mage-queen,” she says, satisfied. “In the heart of Camelot.”

A mage-queen to Arthur’s king. The promise that her father destroyed, given new life by his sacrifice. If there is anything a Pendragon is good at, it’s twisting a curse to become a boon. If there is anything Catia is, it’s a Pendragon.

“No,” snarls Merlin. He slashes upwards, and Catia rolls away from a great shearing scythe of pure magic. “I will not let  _you,_ an elemental- a Pendragon- take from me-”

His staff glows. Bright. Blinding. 

He points it at them, and a pulse erupts out of the tip- Catia dodges and chokes at the pulverized stone of the tower that had been behind Elaine’s head. She freezes the water around them and rolls with Elaine, stumbles backwards, one step, two, three.

Another pulse. Catia tries to shield with the water, but both ice and water has almost no effect. It only results in steam that stings her eyes or shards of ice that spray too close to her eyes. Two stumbling steps backwards. Elaine screaming something. Catia cannot- 

There’s nowhere left to run.

The cliff is at her back- and the rain is lessening, now. Catia can barely hold herself up with heavy rain around her; she’s exhausted, and grieving, and she’s certain that if she’s pushed off- she’ll not be able to save either Elaine or herself.

Merlin lifts the staff and points it at Catia.

Catia tilts her chin back.

She’s miscalculated, she thinks, but then- 

__The mage-queen has returned! Balance is struck, rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!_ _

The rain, singing under even Elaine’s screams. No. Not the rain. The  _river,_ which has saved her and killed her more times than she wants to remember. The river which she has summoned, and the river which has answered.

_Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!_

_You cannot kill me,_ thinks Catia, preternaturally calm as she stares down Merlin with nothing but a river at her side and a girl to protect at her back.  _You cannot kill me with a staff that is_ mine.

The blast of pure magic erupts forwards, and Catia lifts her hands.

It isn’t as easy as it had been with water. Water had been  _hers,_ before anything else. This magic also belongs, partially, to Merlin, who loathes her and hers. And this is something that Catia chooses. Not something she is born to, for all that her birth has given her the opportunity. This magic squirms and shakes and wants to burst into open air, but Catia holds it.

Just moments earlier, she’d held the weight of rain on her shoulders.

She can bear this slippery magic as well.

“You think to kill me with my own staff?” Catia asks, looking beyond the brilliant ball of magic to stare at Merlin. Her eyes water from the strain, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care. Not with Elaine sobbing behind her. “The staff that you have so disgracefully stolen from the House of Pendragon?”

“I will not be ended by the likes of you,” screams Merlin. 

Catia’s hold on the magic becomes even looser. It turns even more slippery, and she can feel the sweat pouring down her face, the effort it takes for her to keep even marginal control, to slow Merlin down even a little. It’s a scarce meter from her- she can feel the heat of it, dull and bright as a sun.

And then, beyond the heat and the shine and the tears in her eyes, Catia sees something dark and small speed at Merlin from straight above. She sees, before even she feels in the magic: Merlin, gone slack and still, head tilted backwards to the skies, hands still aloft. She sees that little ball rise a moment later, circling into the air.  _My smeerle,_ Catia thinks, shaking, trembling, and sees the bird land on someone's forearm- someone's blue-clad, cloaked, outstretched arm.

A scarce moment later she feels his control on his staff and the ball of pure magic loosen, then drop away. 

For the briefest of moments, she holds that. She holds that magic, all of it, in his staff and in that ball, and she feels it like electricity in her veins. Like something has come and flipped her skin inside-out. She realizes, only too late, that  _she_ is shining, as if the ball has become a part of her, and Catia tips her head back to the clouds above- screams-

The world goes  _gold._

...

_You have done well._

Catia looks up. This is- someone else, yet again. Not Bel; not her mother. A woman, who sits very tall and stiff, with long hair that falls in tight curls down her back. Her eyes lie, unwavering, on Catia.

_There were many who did not think you would get even this far. There were many who said that we hoped in vain, for your success. I am glad that you proved them wrong._

_Proved who wrong?_ asks Catia, slowly. 

 _My brothers and sisters,_ says the woman.  _Belenus is very proud of you._

Catia inhales sharply.  _You’re a goddess._

 _Yes,_ she says simply.  _Of many things._

_Like what?_

_Like- water, and flame, and the brightest star in the sky._ Her eyes shine.  _Perhaps you know- Sulis?_

Catia has to fight not to recoil. She knows Sulis, of course; Aquae Sulis, the largest city in the south. The largest Roman conquering since Anglesey.

 _I know what you’re thinking,_ says Sulis, looking amused.  _But I am not Roman. They name me Sulis Minerva- I am not her. I am not the goddess of justice or vengeance or righteous war. I am as I am, as I have been for millennia._

 _Is that why you are here?_ Catia asks.  _Because-_

 _-Belenus wished to speak to you,_ says Sulis calmly.  _But I did as well. Larger gods always think we whose power is tied down to a grove or meadow or baths are too small for them. And so, while Bel and Manannán fought over whose child you are, I simply made their battle more... consuming._

Catia tilts her head to the side.  _You tricked them?_

 _And bound them._ Sulis waves her hand, and a little bubble pops out, showing first Bel caught in twisting ropes of ice and then Manannán in thick vines of oil that periodically burst into flame and eat into his chest.  _They forget, because I am goddess of only one spring, that this leaves me to do_ more,  _not less._   _The waters of Aquae Sulis bind Bel, god of fire. The oils far underneath the springs bind Manannán, god of the seas. And so I am here, to speak to you, who will bring us all the balance that has been shattered by Gormant, your grandfather._

 _Speak to me of what?_ asks Catia.  _I am just- one woman. I don’t know what I’ve done to merit such consideration from the gods._

Sulis smiles. She says,  _Have you not heard of name-gifting?_

Catia closes her eyes. She remembers- she knows- there are protections that come with the name of a family; protections that mean fey and witches cannot simply steal one away from a land without repercussions that come from an entire family. There are protections that come with choosing one’s own name; the relinquishing of familial debts and sins, for when such are too heavy and painful to bear. There are protections that come with taking the name of another, as Catia’s mother had done; there are protections that come with taking no name at all, as the Mage has done. But then there are the names that are not chosen at all.

The names given by the gods.

She’d thought them a myth, truth be told. The last human to be gifted a name would be Mordred, and that was not so much a gift as a curse.

_I did not think it real._

_Your story is not yet over,_ says Sulis gently.  _I am of flame and water, as are you; in time, the bards will sing such stories of you that people a thousand years hence, two thousand years hence, will hear and marvel. And in those stories, they will know you as-_

Her fingers brush over Catia’s neck, soft as a breath of air. 

Knowledge rushes into Catia’s mind: the glow of a white flower. The chill of death and freezing water in her fingers. Pure magic, actinic under her skin. White feathers on the floor of her home. The sweep of a sword like sunlight on still water. Terror, raw in her chest. Love. Grief. Whispers in a library at high noon. Clouds high above her, like white cotton. Silent paths treaded in the middle of the night. Singing for so long that the throat aches. Singing for even longer. Joy, running deeper than the depths of the sea.

 _Arise, my phoenix,_ whispers Sulis, loud as if she’d breathed it into Catia’s ear.

...

Catia comes to.

Every part of her aches. She’s lying face-down in the dirt, cheek pressed against the rough grains of stone. Slowly, Catia lifts her head. Her back is stinging; her palms are abraded, bloodied. All around her, what had been soft grass has turned dust. She looks: everyone is kneeling, fully, all the elementals that she'd kept safe in her tower, including Elaine. There's a high whistle and Catia turns to see the Mage standing a little distance away, Catia's smeerle perched on her forearm.

 _That blue cloak,_ she realizes, and nearly staggers at the revelation.

She looks at the corpse lying in the middle of the crater that she’s blown with the magic: Merlin, flat on his front.

The back of his neck has been torn open.

Torn open with a beak.

As Catia watches, uncomprehending, the Mage goes to her knees. “I chose,” she says, clearly, simply.

There's a gasp from behind Catia, and she glances behind her to see Elaine jerk upwards, stare at the Mage.

“You killed him,” says Catia. 

“He would have killed her,” says the Mage. 

Catia wonders, briefly, who  _her_ is, until Elaine screams something incomprehensible and rushes past Catia. She's sobbing as she throws herself into the Mage’s arms.

“Morgana!” she cries, and the Mage- the Mage whom Catia hasn’t seen embrace anyone, ever, nor even smile- drags her into a hug so tight her knuckles go bloodless. 

The Mage- Morgana- closes her eyes. “Elaine,” she murmurs. “Ah, Elaine, Elaine-  _Elaine-”_

 _Sisters,_ Catia realizes with a shock of realization. The dark hair; the line of their brows; the sharp, unnerving feel to their magic. One a shapeshifter and the other an elemental.  _You’re sisters, and-_

She thinks about a cave, and parents slain by Merlin, and all the sins of a harsh, uncaring world. She thinks- she looks at the people around her, slowly rising, who have sworn fealty to her, and all that it means. The glory. The terror. The promise: _watch me, if you dare._ Catia inhales sharply. She turns away before she can do something ridiculous, like burst into tears.

...

The sunset is beautiful.

She balances the staff on her knees and leans back. Slowly, because her back still flares with pain from the glass, but she's as healed as she can be. The aloe the healers placed on the cuts still sting. She stares above her. The wind is cold, but unrelenting. She’s alone for the first time since killing Merlin, and it’s quiet. There's a lot to do down there- people are moving in rapid, panicked circles. Her people now. 

But it's so peaceful up here. She breathes, in, out, in, out, in, out. The air is sweet in her lungs.

“Catia?”

She turns, a little, mostly because she knows that voice. She's been ignoring everyone else, all the little things that are going to come up as soon as she claims her throne and crown. She wants her peace for now. But this is someone she owes more to than peace- she remembers him launching forwards, the sword angled perfectly; even as he'd done it, he'd known it to be hopeless. He'd done it anyway, and she's not sure if she can owe him any deeper than she does.

As she watches, Arthur pulls himself onto the roof of her tower. He looks- not well. There’s dried blood along his skull, darkening the rest of his hair, and dust lining his face. But he’s also stripped off his overcoat in favor of a shirt that hugs his chest and arms. It leaves her mouth a little dry, before she shoves that part of herself away. 

“Arthur,” she returns instead. “How’d you get up here?” 

“I didn’t walk up all those floors, if that’s what you’re asking,” he says, making his way over to her with the carelessness of someone unafraid of heights. It makes her stomach clench with something more than fear. “Gods, this was hard enough. Those air elementals are- something. When I said I wanted to see you- they took me up. Didn’t think once that a man might not be used to flying!”

She laughs, scraping and real. “They take some getting used to, all of them.”

“Hmm. And I’ll need to read more now, seems like.” She glances at him, and sees the sharp look in his eyes. The glint of intelligence that he so often hides. “What with me not knowing what a mage-queen is, and why Merlin’s sword’s important- who knows what might have happened.”

“If I hadn’t stopped him, you mean.”

“If you hadn’t stopped him we’d all be dead, so I suppose you’re right.”

“Arthur-”

“Catia,” he says, and sounds so warm, so firm, that she needs to blink back tears.

“I could help you,” she says haltingly. “Learn about- those things. Mages. Magic. The history of Camelot.”

“I’d like that,” he says. “And I think you’ll find it easier if you’ve a reason to stay beyond habit.”

“What do you mean?” she asks, scarcely hoping-

Arthur lies back, and the very tips of his fingers are brushing her wrist, and she wonders if he can feel the jackrabbit pace of her pulse. The painful lightness in her nails, in her neck, in the depths of her muscles. He says, slowly: “When I saw you on a horse in my courtyard, surrounded by spears- you looked scared. You looked like you might faint. You looked- so small.” His hand brushes, solidly, against her skin, and she’s never felt so expectant before. He says, quietly, exquisitely, stutteringly, staggeringly hopeful: “I’ve never seen anyone have eyes that bright before.”

Something alights in her fingers, bright, so bright, unendingly bright. Searing in its ferocity. 

He’s scraped himself raw, peeled all of his barriers apart for this moment. For her. For  _her._

“Arthur,” she says, and reaches out, grips his hand. Answers the question that he hasn’t asked her. “Yes, of course. Of course I’ll take it.” She has to breathe in through her mouth, shallow, because her heart’s racing so fast. 

He asks- “What will you take?”- like it’s a joke, a whisper, and she swallows everything else that she’s lost, everything else that she might have wanted to tell him, to say, “Whatever you give me.”

They settle, still strangely breathless, her back to his chest, skin to skin, warm. They stare above them, to the sun so distant and small; to the stars slowly being revealed in the purple sky. She lets the staff, now heavy and almost deadened in her palms, roll across her knees so Arthur sees it.

"I held the magic inside this," she says. "I've never felt anything like it. The power. The- fear. I don't know how Merlin bore it. I couldn't hold it. I fell unconscious."

"Yes. The Mage told me," he says. "So did- ah, Bill."

_"What?"_

"Bedivere twisted his ear the whole way," says Arthur wryly. "But he told me that I should wed you because if I didn't help him get Northumbrian salmon by midsummer, he'd hang you, me and then himself." He takes one look at her face and rubs her wrist with one thumb. "He was talking very fast. 'M sure we'll need to hear it all over again. Not that anyone could find you to tell you anything."

"I had to... think. I fell unconscious when I held all that magic," she says, slowly, hesitating. "I dreamed of the gods."

"A good dream or a bad dream?" asks Arthur.

She leans back against him- the solid weight of him, the warmth. She says, "A gift. To be used as I wish it. A name."

There's a long silence.

"Like Mordred?" he asks finally. "Like- like Bel gave to Mordred?"

"Yes. Precisely that."

“What’s the name?” 

She closes her eyes.  _Mordred_ had meant moderation, and he'd been anything but. She can only hope this name won't be ironic. “It means white phantom. White shadow. White wave.”

“Catia-”

“No,” she says. “Not any longer. History will call me something else. When I’m crowned, they won’t call me Catia.”

She breathes deep.

Inhales. 

Looks at Arthur, who will be king to her queen. Who will rule by her side, good and true and bright. The born king, to the mage-queen. His lashes are silver in the moonlight, where in all others they're gilt and gold. His eyes are as bright as the river far beneath. She reaches up, and lays a hand on his cheek, and summons that name which Sulis, goddess of flame and water gave her.

Breathes out. 

She is shaking. So much has changed. So much has been lost, and taken. But she is alive. And she has always had a gift for turning curses into blessings. She is a Pendragon, whatever else she has lost or gained along the way. 

“My name,” she says, “is Guinevere.”

...

 _i might tire myself out from struggling_  
_and drown-_  
_but_  
_i will not sink._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> References

A list of notes/references to the story. It didn't fit into the endnotes of last chapter, so... well. Nothing's perfect and history's just a hobby of mine, so apologies for all historical inaccuracies. Most links are to wiki, but HERE WE ARE I GUESS!

  1. Catia’s supposed to be dead when Vortigern takes her to the caves, but we’re pretending that she was still alive! Just... kind of unconscious. I did use [Charlotte Corday](https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/extrasensory-perceptions/lucid-decapitation2.htm) as a sort of reference re: people who were dead but didn’t know it yet (pls don't click on that link if you're not sure you can't handle something really gross and gory?)
  2. The sirens don’t exist in this verse! .........or do they???
  3. The fire-god is [Belenus,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belenus) the sun-god from Celtic mythology
  4. [That white flower that I keep blabbering on about](https://images.meredith.com/content/dam/bhg/Images/2008/10/SIP944538.jpg.rendition.largest.ss.jpg)
  5. Whenever I refer to the waterfall in the beginning- it’s a scene that actually comes from the movie, but I can’t find a picture to link. Gah.
  6. "Eastern wind blow clear blow clean"--> that song is from [Mercedes Lackey, _Wind’s Four Quarters._](http://www.moron.nl/lyrics/mercedes-lackey/winds-four-quarters-lyrics.html)
  7. Mordred and Vortigern really really DO like a lot of fire imagery
  8. Merlin lifts magnesium out of the ground when he causes that explosion. Magnesium is... highly explosive, to say the least. How he oxidizes magnesium to Mg2+ is, you guessed it, magic!
  9. Catia’s mother’s name is Elsa. Arthur’s mother’s name isn’t given in the movie.
  10. [Tintagel](https://www.google.co.in/maps/place/Tintagel,+UK/@50.6626426,-4.757453,15z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x486b830ced235ff1:0x219476ff5a85aa6a!8m2!3d50.66301!4d-4.75066) and [Pictish Scotland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picts)
  11. [I actually did research what a proper Auld English Poet would be called. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scop)YOU’RE WELCOME 
  12. [The sea-goat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legio_II_Augusta#/media/File:Caerleon_plaque2.JPG)
  13. [Anglesey and the Roman conquest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_conquest_of_Anglesey)
  14. Bah, dream #2 is hashtag Andromeda Remix
  15. [Enemies of the state were dealt with by burning alive in Ancient Rome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_burning#Antiquity)
  16. We’re also going to ignore that during the pulling-sword-from-stone scene, a man says "god save the king". I CHOSE MY TIME PERIOD AND I'M STICKING W/IT.
  17. [Vortigern and his white dragon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dragon)
  18. [Vortigern’s predilection for white and black and also just plain luxury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dragon)
  19. The iron maiden was [never actually used,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_maiden) but it’s one of those things which I need to add to a story on medieval kings/queens/ruling
  20. [Igraine = Ygraine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igraine) (the english version vs the french version). She is actually from Cornwall! 
  21. Also Igraine/Gorlois/Uther’s a nice and painful love triangle with all the terrible grief/unhealthiness that I like from my ships so ofc I needed that in there as well
  22. Also also, the way Igraine died felt so- vicious to me, and angry. Vortigern tends to... not care about people he kills, such that when he kills the prostitute in front of Arthur the camera pays more attention to Arthur's face than it does to the woman killed. But when Igraine dies? There's a long, lovingly panned shot over her shock and numb pain and it felt rather ridiculously overdone to me. But then I got the answer! Because Vortigern cares about his pride and about his power and about others' mockery of him far more than he actually does people loving him, and if Igraine had trampled all over those previous three by choosing Uther over him? Of course he'd loathe her. Of course he'd kill her first, and most brutally.
  23. Catia really did [stand behind her father during executions.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_QtQRkKa8s&t=14s)
  24. Elaine in Arthurian mythology is Arthur’s half-sister. So is Morgana, both from Ygraine's earlier marriage to Gorlois. Clearly in this, neither of them are- but they are full sisters to each other. 
  25. Three was a powerful druidic number... three into three into three was even more powerful
  26. [Londinium = London;](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium) [Tamesas = Thames;](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Thames#Etymology) Camelot is another city altogether
  27. Air elementals in the story are from Tintagel, which is Cornwall! A common name from Cornwall is Tristram! [A famous Cornish knight is also called Tristram!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_and_Iseult)
  28. The history of the Cornish language is FASCINATING. Check out [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language) for a good primer on it.
  29. Though during the time this story takes place, the language should technically be Common Brythonic... We're ignoring THIS as well. [DIES INSIDE THAT I DIDN'T STUDY LINGUISTICS]
  30. If this story takes place a couple decades after Anglesey, hawking/falconry should not be a common practice. [This man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor) is credited with making it a common hobby for a lot of nobility in Europe, but he existed about a thousand years after this story takes place. WE ARE IGNORING ALL OF IT
  31. [A smeerle is called a merlin in english nowadays.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_\(bird\)) Irony ftw!
  32. “Camelot protects her own” is obviously a tribute to Hogwarts
  33. Belenus is the god of fire. Manannan is the god of the sea. [Sulis is the god of the baths at Bath, in Somerset](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulis). She's associated with Minerva. And also vengeance? Which is really cool?
  34. [Morgana means  _from the sea_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_le_Fay#Etymology_and_origins)
  35. [Guinevere means white phantom/wave/shadow](https://nameberry.com/babyname/Guinevere)
  36. Gormant is the [name of Arthur's half-brother](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igraine#Geoffrey_of_Monmouth_and_Welsh_tradition); it sounded appropriately Pendragonlike.
  37. [Title](https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sleepingatlast/light.html)
  38. [Poem 1](http://madeleinewitt.net/post/180190887605/1430-read-all-30)
  39. [Poem 2](http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=791) 




End file.
